Product Life Cycle and Consumer Life Cycles

One of the social web’s by products er, products, are “shiny new objects”. (new services that launch and send us enthusiasts into a tizzy. All the web 2.0 greats were shiny new objects at some point in time)  There were a couple of wonderful posts I read in this context. The first is Rex Hammock’s excellent post on how we obsess over these for sometime, and then move on. Yes, I know you know that, but its the next part that’s interesting.

Then one day about three years later, you notice people who aren’t obsessed with shiny new objects are talking about something four-or-five shiny new objects ago and you wonder: Why is everyone obsessed with this?

This happens to me occasionally, the latest example being a few guys tweeting about the Baba Ramdev- Chrome ad that was circulated around quite a few months back.

The second post was great, right from the title – The Loneliness of the Early Adopter, and when i shared it on Friendfeed, at least a couple of guys liked it. I confess I’m more at the borderline of early majority and early adopter, (refer this ) but I could empathise with a lot of that post.

Now, a long way back, Jeremiah had an awesome post on Applying a social computing strategy to the entire product lifecycle. As the title suggests, its about listening to consumers, collaborating on product development, filtering out the right consumers, learning from them and supporting them and in essence, utilising the social web in all parts of the PLC. Here’s another great post in Social Media Explorer on the same theme.

Twitter and more so Friendfeed (as this Mashable article explains) and Facebook (commenting on status and other elements of the newsfeed, the ‘Like’ feature) are great examples of how the product/service is evolving with the consumer and his preferences. Increasingly consumers are ‘creating’ a use or finding a way to fulfill a need gap from a basic service.

The question is, who is the consumer? I’m trying to juxtapose the Product life cycle with a consumer life cycle. Are the tastes and preferences of the early adopters markedly different from that of the late majority? As the adoption of various social media services rapidly increases, who would a service target, and will it be at the cost of another segment? Different consumers, located at different points on the Roger’s bell curve will use the service at the same time. How can these possibly different sets of expectations be met? Will there be variations of the same service for different categories of users? I don’t see the issue being addressed a lot now, that possibly explains why a lot of people leave say, Twitter after a few tweets/days since they can’t figure out what’s happening? Would a ‘nOOb version’ have helped? Social media is about customisation too, and this might be something that needs to be answered soon, as these services become mass.