“Trends aren’t transmitted hierarchically, as they used to be,” explains Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, a trend forecasting company. “They’re now transmitted laterally and collaboratively via the internet. You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream.”

This is a quote from an article about the effect of blogs and social media on fashion and trends. It’s not got much to do with software, except that quote above made me think of Geoffrey Moore and his Chasm analogy to technology adoption. At first glance, it’s a tasty idea: ie, that Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. have democratised information flow and collapsed the gap between early adopters and the early majority.

As much as I’d like it to be true, the more I think about it the more I think it’s a load of bollocks for technology (and probably for the context of the original article as well, but let me stick to technology). I’m constantly reminded when visiting customers that there is a large group of developers out there who don’t use twitter, blogs, or for that matter, visit developer-related websites. For many in this group, programming is a job, and when they aren’t programming, they generally aren’t reading about it, arguing about it, or thinking about it. That’s not to say they aren’t thinking, arguing or reading, just not about development. These guys would be firmly in one of the Majority sections of Moore’s model, and no amount of speedy information flow through Twitter is going to reach them, let alone influence them.

What has happened is of course that the early adopters have got a much more efficient communications mechanism, so information can spread across that group much more quickly than ever before.

Basically, you can get to the chasm much more quickly now, but crossing it is still hazardous.