3 years ahead of cool

No one wants to be the person that wears clothes that were in style 3 years ago, or worse ten years ago. Some people do not care, do not know, or define their own sense of cool, but no one actually tries to be behind. In the tech world we would call that a late adopter.

Scoble is famous for being a cool-hunter, an early adopter. He is part of that group that defines what is cool, and everyone else follows suit with-in the next few months. I have actually started using several new tools after reading about them on Scobleizer or read about them a few weeks after I started using them.

I tend to be an early adopter in software and a late adopter with hardware. Our camera is four years old, phones are at least two, car is twelve, and printer is… I don’t know… but really old. I get behind on the hardware because I am spending so much time on software. My goal for hardware is to get something that will just get out of my way.

The funny thing though is that in some areas I am, or would be if I could build it myself, years ahead of the early adopters. Scoble is finally talking about moving his life online. In other words storing all of his data online so all that he has to install on a new computer is Firefox and he is ready to go. This is something I did three years ago. I started talking about eInk about three years before I read about them starting their research, and was expecting the Kindle three years before it was released.

I guess you could say I am three years ahead of cool.

It is kinda lonely on this end of history, but somebody has got to do it, right? Being out-style because you are ahead is ever bit as painful, but for different reasons. People make fun of you for your impossible and useless ideas, saying things like, “There is no way they could ever make that work and no one would want it if they could.” I comfort myself with this prediction from some famous person in the 40’s or 50’s, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”

If the current trend holds Scoble’s mom should using RSS in about a year, and then it will finally be cool for whole families to communicate by blogging.