tech hipsters

i got the overwhelming sense this morning that there's a gradient of how hip you are in tech. in hindsight that's almost the meaning of tech, because being recent on technology basically defines you as a hipster. but even within that community there's the hipsters who are first adopters, and there are the slower tech giants, and the all encompassing tech consuming masses that follow trends.

if you look historically at how the internet generation came to be, you'd see that there has always been a trend of cutting edge technology being slowly adopted, then suddenly becoming mainstream, then become obsolete and lagging. Apple and Microsoft were hipsters in their time especially compared to established behemoths like IBM. Google was and still is the hotshot, but their hipster rep is going quickly as they become the new evil empire Microsoft became after Windows XP. The iPhone was a sign that you were a hipster both in tech and music, and for the longest time I resisted it. But i'm a late adopter. Nowadays droid is the new thing, and even that is becoming mainstream too quickly for owners to really be early adopters.

We move on to the world of social networking. Facebook and Twitter, with their lack of business models but meteoric rise in popularity, have matured to become platforms for other businesses that are based purely on facebook and twitter apps. Foursquare, which resides solely on the formerly hipster crowd of smartphone users, is now a platform upon which more forward thinking developers build their newest apps. And everyone is trying to push into the crowded apps startup world, so that there are even apps that characterize you and build a social network based on which apps you possess. In other words, whether you're an apps hipster and at the front line, or whether you're downloading and running something because your grandfather told you that all of his friends at the retirement center use on their iphones.

Where do we go from here? What's the newest level of hipsterness, that will be built on the networks of apps that run on facebook that run through google's servers that run on a windows or mac OS that run on a PC or Apple machine?

speaking of hipsters

har har