The times they are a changin'

I was talking with an old friend last night about social media, web 2.0, and the various tools and devices that are out there to help manage and add value to our lives.
She is somewhat of a newbie when it comes to these issues,but her eagerness to learn as much as she can was palpable.
She mentioned that despite having had a computer for a number of years, she really wasn't connected due to her home being in a rural area with no broadband. But recently (at last!) broadband has come to her area and she can now truly be connected.
The most interesting thing is that despite our different backgrounds and experience with computers, her excitement and interest in connectivity at least equals my own. Of course this gets back to our human need to connect to people outside our immediate environment.
As I mentioned in a much earlier post, surfing the net used to be more of a screen watching activity than interactive platform we now enjoy. My friend spoke of this in our conversation. I think she said, that despite being online for a number of years, she had never really found any aspect of the web to be particularly compelling and simply used it as I once did which was to search out specific information.
But today web 2.0 offers so much more. And she is seeing that too. We discussed our mutual fascination with forums such as linkedIn. Finally there is an offering on he web that is compelling enough to not only draw interest but sustain interest for web users across the continuum from newbie to the completely tech savvy.
The ability to interact with people all over the world on subjects of mutual interest is not only a great experience, but one that also provides insight and best practices on the topic of interest to the users. It seems there is a linked in group for just about any topic area one
can think of.
It appears now that both of us are hooked! Each for different reasons, but the bottom line for both of us is that web 2.0 technology is fundamentally changing the way we work, learn, and communicate.
I have long posited that new technologies only enjoy rapid adoption rates when they do in fact fundamentally change the way we behave. Take the VCR for example. VCRs were on the scene in the early 1980's yet it was another 20 years for it to reach high household penetration levels. Similarly the DVR and the ability to time-shift viewing has been available in one form or another since roughly 1999 or so. Today only about 25% of households have a DVR and even fewer people use it frequently. In fact the TVB reported in 2010 that the average adult spends 5 and 1/2 hours watching live television every day but less tha. 30 minutes per day watching DVR'd programming.
Neither of these technologies fundamentally changes our behavior. But guess what did? You got it--the smart phone and the Ipad. Both of these devices are in fact fundamentally changing our behavior and how we communicate. More than 13 million ipads have been sold since April 2010. By this time next year, it is likely that figure will substantially more than double. Or at least that is my own humble opinion!

Until next time!