Not too long ago I would have described myself as what is affectionately called an early adopter. Very little made my day more than having a nice new service or piece of software to play with before anyone else.  I thoroughly enjoyed having stacks of beta invites in my inbox just itching to be clicked and consumed.  It was a glorious time, and there was very little better than showing off my new toys to my friends.

Even when I was knee deep in newness, at some point it became taxing to keep starting over. Once where I was overjoyed to build something new, it felt like a chore.  More often than not it was beginning to work my nerves to keep having to enter in my birthdate for all the profiles that would soon lead to nowhere. To combat this, many of the developers caught on to the annoyance and found ways to use existing services for login purposes.  At that point it was already too late.

I must either be getting old or I have just found a set of tools that work great for my needs. I don’t go out of my way asking for invites to things and half the time ignore the ones I already  have.  I do not want to use this thing over here that looks just like this other thing, which isn’t broken and does not need to be replaced.  I do not want to have to invite my friends to something else when I can already keep up with them in 90 other places.

I do not want green eggs and ham.

There are plenty of folks left in the world who are still chasing that “Ooh Shiny” high, and they can have at it. The downside of the trend is that at some point when the shimmer starts to wear off, some of them treat the people that remain in the communities built like they are flaming dog crap on the front porch. Unfortunately, most of the time this is not even intentional and even the early adopters themselves are beginning to splinter off into smaller groups over it.

Choosing the tools over the people is always going to cause more problems than it is worth. Following around some random guy you never met on the quest for the technological equivalent of a sugar high is not good for you either. I am sure there is some middle ground where you can appreciate the aspects of both can be reached.