In socio-economics there's the upper class, the middle class and the lower class. In a wired society there's: the power users, the lay-user and the afraid-of-the-computer user. In a web 2.0 society: the update-every-days, the update-once-in-a-whiles and the why-bothers.
The people who use web 2.0 social web apps is a subset of a subset of a small set. They are all techies and are playing to the techie crowd. Question is: will these sites continue to only play to the techie crowd, or as time goes by, will the new (younger) generation become the update-ever-day kind and take these sites out of hobby-mode to actually-can-make-money status?
I check facebook and friendfeed all the time but what I find is that there's only a certain minority of my friends who use these web 2.0 apps, and an even smaller subset of them that update their status or other feed-worthy activity. It's a very small set of people who are avid users, the majority of all my friends (all of whom use email) don't use the web 2.0 app because there's little return on investment (of time).
Updating one's status, or one's blog or any 'feed-worthy' activity is an investment of time. Why would I want to write a review on a travel site or a movie review site or a restaurant review site? What do I get in return? If I feel like I'm party of a community then maybe it's stature. Most of the time, it's for people to broadcast their thoughts opinions. Most people don't care to broadcast.
Maybe future generations will be using these web 2.0 apps like we use the telephone. Blogging and broadcasting feed-worthy activity will be as routine as checking email. Maybe.
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