Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Editor-at-Large Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space. You can follow the author on Twitter and Google+.

Give credit to Google: Its strategic and orchestrated launch of Google+ has been nearly flawless.

Early reviews were positive but reserved, thanks to Google’s failure with Google Buzz. Like clockwork though, technology celebrities like Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose starting flooding Google’s social network and singing its praises. Taking a cue from Gmail, Google released invites in small bursts, sparking a clamor for invites across the web.

The result of Google’s carefully planned campaign is an estimated user base of 10 million in just two weeks. More importantly, engagement on Google+ is extremely high, with many reporting they get more responses on Google+ than they do on Twitter or Facebook. It’s clear that Google+ has momentum.

That’s nice, but the momentum is starting to blind Google+ users and the press to reality. Here’s the truth: Google+ is dominated almost entirely by early adopters. And early adopters, while important, are not great predictors of the success of a social network.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and revisit some social media services that have been embraced by early adopters. What has happened to them and what it might mean for the future of Google+?

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The Technology Adoption Lifecycle

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia, NatebaileyMany of you have probably heard of the technology adoption lifecycle and Rogers’ bell curve. It is a sociological model developed in the 1950s to predict the normal distribution of technology adoption. Innovators and early adopters make up the first 16% of any given population that accepts a new technology. They are more risk-oriented, tend to be community leaders and aren’t afraid to try new things. However, that still leaves 84% of the population to adopt a new technology.

Let’s put these percentages in the context of Facebook and Google+. Zuckerberg said last week that he believes Facebook has hit critical mass. He also announced that Facebook has 750 million users. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s the potential market for the adoption of a social media service. If we do the math, that means that the first 120 million users are early adopters for social networking. That’s a long way from the current 10 million.

Whether you agree with my math or not, it’s clear that Google+ is dominated by an early-adopter crowd. Only early-adopter crowds could make Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose among the top ten most popular users on Google+. I even have a term for this phenomenon: The Robert Scoble Effect.

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A History of Early Adoption

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There’s nothing wrong with early adopters — you need them to test and evangelize your products. Every product starts with early adopters, though some start with a different crowd than others (remember, Facebook started out as a social network for college students).

However, early adopters shouldn’t be used as an indication that a technology product is destined for success. Let’s look at what has happened to a couple of technology products that either are or were once hot with the early adopter community:

FriendFeed: In 2008 and 2009, FriendFeed was all the rage. Its real-time stream and long comment threads were the precursors to the technology now standard on Facebook and Google+. The tech press wrote about it constantly, predicting that it would beat out the competition.

FriendFeed gained a cult-like following, but it never broke out into the mainstream. In 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed for $50 million. It was a nice exit, but with companies like Groupon and Zynga filing for IPOs that could be worth more than $20 billion, FriendFeed never turned early adopters into a mainstream audience.

Quora: At the end of last year, nobody could shut up about Quora, the social Q&A startup co-founded by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo. It was in the middle of a perfect storm.

Since then, discussion of Quora has dropped off tremendously, and so has usage of the Q&A site. Follower growth has stalled since May. It also suffers from the Robert Scoble Effect, as the technology enthusiast is still Quora’s most followed user.

Let’s be clear: it’s still too early to make a final judgment on Quora, but the Q&A site is a good example of the fickleness of early adopters.

Twitter: On the other hand, Twitter is a good example of how an early adopter product can go mainstream. Twitter was dominated by early adopters for the longest time. It wasn’t until Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and Shaq joined that the social media service’s growth shot to the moon.

Now Twitter users generate more than 200 million tweets per day, and its most popular users aren’t Robert Scoble or Kevin Rose: it’s Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama.

Buzz: Let’s not forget that Google launched a social product last year, one that received a ton of accolades. We all know how that turned out.

Image courtesy A. Stiffler

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Google+ Hasn’t Truly Been Tested

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Let’s be clear: We’re not trying to predict the future of Google+ after just two weeks of use. Overall, we like Google+ and think it brings some new ideas to the table. In fact, we’ve been surprised by the engagement we’ve received on Google+ thus far.

Still, all of this can be attributed to the early adopter effect. Is your mom using Google+? Is your sister using Google+? Have your friends in finance or medicine joined the Google+ revolution yet? We bet the answer is a resounding “no” in the vast majority of cases. At least your grandma has heard of Facebook.

So while Google+ may be riding a tidal wave of momentum at the moment, it’s still a toy of the early adopter. And until it can prove that it has a place in a world dominated by more mainstream networks, we suggest not abandoning your Facebook profile just yet.

LG has extended its Optimus series of smartphones with two new low-end models: the LG Optimus Pro (LG-C660) and the LG Optimus Net (LG-P690).

Both phones are running Android 2.3 or Gingerbread with a 800MHz CPU and a 3-megapixel camera. Both are heavily social networking oriented.

The Optimus Pro sports a portrait bar full QWERTY keyboard, and a 2.8-inch touchscreen above it. It has dedicated hotkeys for email and scheduler. It comes in white, titan and black.

The Optimus Net has a 3.2-inch HVGA (320 x 480) screen and an integrated social networking widget that will let users update their Facebook and Twitter accounts with a single click while reading their friends’ social feeds on the screen at the same time.

The Optimus Net will be quite a different device depending on the market. In the U.S, it’ll have a QWERTY keyboard, and in Brazil, China, Asia and parts of Eastern Europe, the Optimus Net will be dual SIM-compatible. The device will also be NFC-enabled in certain European markets.

The naive farmer farms as his parents, grandparents and great grandparents did. She plants, hopes and harvests. Anything that goes well or poorly is the work of the gods.

The professional farmer measures. She tests. She understands how systems work and is constantly tweaking to improve them. When failure happens, she doesn’t rest until she understands why.

I didn”t use the word amateur, because money isn’t the point. The naive farmer is failing to take responsibility and failing to learn. The naive marathon runner straps on sneakers and runs (but doesn’t finish). The professional marathoner trains. The naive office worker empties his inbox. The professional works to understand how the office functions.

Mostly, the professional asks questions… What’s next? How to improve? What’s this worth? Why is this happening?

By the way, it’s possible to be naive and happy. It’s difficult to be naive and productive, though.

I spent the last week working with Western Seed and Juhudi Kilimo, two vibrant companies that are helping small-plot farmers in Kenya (and beyond) dramatically increase their yields, their income and their well-being. It became clear early on that the real challenge is to help the naive become professional. Once you open that door (whether it’s about how you build a website, swim laps or teach school), so many other things fall into place.

Before you can sell a service, a product or an insight to the naive, you need to sell them on being professional.

When I write something into Google+ or Twitter, the response is instant (especially in Google+). I get feedback. I get ideas. I get chatter. I get conversation.

When I write something for a blog post, I get a response over the course of the day. I hear people’s thoughtful responses. I hear people echoing my thoughts. I hear people disagreeing.

When I write for the long haul, like a book, there’s no feedback. There’s me. It’s the loneliness of the long distance runner. It’s me and the page. It’s me and the project. It’s me and trying to get that word count up.

What’s the difference?

We Are Quite Often Feedback Driven

With me, personally, it’s praise. I’m addicted to praise. I want someone to say that I’m clever, that I’ve helped them, that what I’ve said makes so much sense and they can’t believe they didn’t see it that way. Sometimes, in the case of using Google+ or Twitter, I might be temporarily lonely, or feeling invisible, and I just want the response. I want to see my words bounce off someone, see them respond back, and get that “Sawubona” feeling.

But feedback isn’t the only thing that matters.

Writing For the Long Haul

I’m learning about Crossfit (a kind of physical fitness regimen), and in so doing, I’m being retrained to do things I felt that I already knew how to do, but clearly don’t. For instance, I’m learning the proper way to squat, the proper way to press a barbell over my head, the best way to do a sit-up, and things like this. The results are nowhere near immediate. You can’t touch my arm or chest or whatever and say, “Whoa. You are working out!” But, if all goes well, in a handful of months, you’ll see me at some event and the changes will be apparent. (Note: I’m doing this for myself, not so that you’ll notice such at an event, but you get the point.)

Writing for the long haul is this way. I’m currently working on a few book projects at the same time. Luckily, Julien Smith has pretty much seized control (in the best way) of one of them, and I’m enjoying watching his passion for the project grow. For our next book together, Julien and me, I have a growing passion for the subject matter. For my other-other book (not yet announced), I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, and turn a book manuscript in within the span of about six weeks. The challenge is exciting, plus the work will be really good for me, as I’m passionate about the material. I’ve put zero words to paper for book 2 or 3 yet. (Thankfully, book 1 is pretty much in the can, and Julien owns the edits). Why? Because it’s so much easier to stay addicted to feedback.

A Diet of Sorts

Instead, when thinking about the long haul in writing, in life, in business, in everything, you’ve got to build a whole different kind of experience into it for yourself. You’ve got to realize that this is the good stuff, the broccoli, the dark leafy greens, the vitamins, the macro and micro nutrients of your life. The long haul in business, in writing, in fitness, in whatever, is the stuff that will give you something sustainable and something useful.

We can’t live on candy alone, it turns out.

And You?

How’s your diet going? How’s that feedback feeling going? How much time do you sacrifice to that hunger for instant feedback, instead of investing that same time into the deeper benefits of the long haul? Just curious.

When Yoav Medan’s mother Judith passed away in June, the Israel-based medical technology executive couldn’t decide what he wanted to write on her tombstone. After deliberating with his family, Medan decided to turn to technology for the answer and attach a QR code to the grave in Haifa, Israel.

Scanning the QR code leads visitors to a tribute website that Medan has setup and plans to evolve with stories and photos from his mother’s life. “I didn’t know what we wanted to write on the tombstone and it will never be everything for everyone. By having something that is dynamic and can extend over time, we can capture it,” he told me this week in an interview at TED Global in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Over time, Medan hopes the QR code and memorial site will help create a lasting history of his mother that will live on for generations. “I was most concerned about 20 or 40 years from now, how will she be remembered … I wanted to put what’s in our memory into a place that doesn’t forget,” he said.

The QR code itself is a laser engraving, filled with a black paste, and sits behind a piece of glass on the tombstone. “The guy who built the tombstone, he wants to make a business out of it,” said Medan.

He think the idea could catch on based on the feedback he’s been hearing. “People identify with this way of keeping the memory of someone and actually making it dynamic and evolving with time as you remember more,” he said. The QR code-enabled tombstone adds a new twist to the growing number of services we’ve seen emerge that are designed to help us decide what happens to our online identity after we die and create digital tributes to our lost loved ones.

What do you think of this way of remembering your loved ones? Let us know in the comments.

San Diego is launching North America’s first large-scale all-electric car sharing fleet with itty-bitty EVs people can grab quickly, easily and spontaneously.

Daimler subsidiary car2go will roll out 300 Smart ForTwo Electric Drives by the end of the year. Subscribers will simply grab a car from designated spots around the city. That’s a contrast to Zipcar, which requires users to pick up and return vehicles from the same location. The goal, says car2go, is to make car sharing easier, faster and more practical.

“The launch of an all-electric vehicle fleet marks a new era in car sharing in North America,” said Nicholas Cole, president and CEO of car2go. “Our goal is to complement the existing transportation infrastructure by providing an emission-free car sharing service for short and spontaneous one-way trips.”

We’ve seen this before, albeit on a much smaller scale. Two years ago, Baltimore rolled out a small fleet of neighborhood electric vehicles people could use in the Inner Harbor district. And ZipCar added eight Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrids to its fleets in three cities earlier this year.

But San Diego is placing the biggest bet on the idea. It is a riff on the car2go car sharing program Daimler launched in Ulm, Germany, three years ago. Daimler expanded the program to Austin, Texas; Hamburg, Germany; and Vancouver, British Columbia in 2009. Car2go has more than 40,000 members who share 1,000 conventional Smart ForTwo coupes.

Electric vehicles make sense for an urban car sharing program. Although the Smart Electric Drive is maddeningly slow and less practical than, say, the Nissan Leaf, it is suited to city driving. It’s small but roomy and a snap to park. It’s got a range of 84 miles, plenty for life in the city because Car2go says its drivers rarely go more than six miles. And while the Smart ED isn’t the best ambassador for the technology, getting more cars with cords on the road can only help push them further into the mainstream.

San Diego is working with Ecotality to install 1,000 public charging stations and plans to have them online by year’s end.

No word on when people can sign up for the service or what they’ll pay, but the car2go program in Austin charges a one-time registration fee of $35 and 35 cents minute for the cars, up to $12.99 an hour or $65.99 a day.

Car2go says the cars will feature “the latest car2go telematics technology,” which will allow “fully automated, easy and convenient” rentals.

Photo: A Smart ForTwo Electric Drive at Windansea Beach in La Jolla. Daimler

Foursquare‘s Employee Number Three, Head of Server Engineering Harry Heymann, took to Reddit Thursday to answer questions about all things related to Foursquare and coding.

Heymann opened himself up to a barrage of queries from Internet nerds who want details on everything from Foursquare’s homebrewed dev solutions to the worst thing about working at the company.

Here’s the condensed highlights of the thread. You can go to Reddit to quiz Heymann on other topics — say, last fall’s epic bout of downtime and the post-mortem that involved an engineering all-nighter and a statement from MongoDB.

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What were some of the major technology decisions you made, both good ones and bad ones, which have had the largest impact on Foursquare’s growth?

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Harry Heymann: My four biggest technology decisions:

1. Scala. Nearly our entire server codebase is written in Scala (if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a programming language that is basically what you would get if Java + ML had a baby). This has worked out super well. It enables us to write concise easy to deal with code that is typechecked at compile time. It’s also been a big help with recruiting.
2. MongoDB. Nearly all of our backend storage is on MongoDB. This has also worked out pretty well. It’s enabled us to scale up faster/easier than if we had rolled our own solution on top of PostgreSQL (which we were using previously). There have been a few roadbumps along the way, but the team at 10gen has been a big help with thing.
3. Amazon Web Services. Kind of a no-brainer: It’s the default hosting environment for startups these days. Mostly great. I wish the IO (disk) situation there was better.
4. Lift. A web framework written in Scala. This one is the trickyest. Lift has a lot of cool features we really love but hasn’t seen super wide adoption and it has some rough edges. Still not certain how this will work out in the long run.

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What are the best and worst things about working for Foursquare?

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HH: Totally cheesy to say, but the best thing about working at Foursquare is the team. We really do have a great group of folks here that are very good at what they do and are all working incredibly hard to help the company succeed.

The worst thing is that Foursquare has invaded my life 24-7. I never stop thinking about it ever. Not being able to turn that off sucks sometimes. Also the pressure to meet our potential is pretty big. Scary sometimes. Don’t want to screw it up.

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What kind of internal tools has Foursquare built?

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HH: Jason Liszka and Jorge Ortiz wrote a nifty query DSL that we open sourced a while back called Rogue.

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What is your favorite use of the Foursquare API by a third party developer?

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HH: 4squareand4yearsago!

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Having been involved since the beginning, do you feel there were any disadvantages to being based outside Silicon Valley?

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HH: No, not many disadvantages. We had everything we needed for the early stages of our company in NY. We’ve expanded to San Francisco to increase our capacity to bring on great engineers (of which there are many in the Bay Area), but that was only after we grew to a certain scale.

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Is it friendly rivalry between you and Gowalla, or more heated than that? I was just wondering.

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HH: I think having them around pushed us to build a much better product much faster. Competition keeps you on your toes.

Anything McLaren builds, I like. I’ve got one of the original McLaren F1s, so I was anxious to place my order for an MP4-12C, the latest supercar out of Woking.

I was amazed how easy the process was. Buying a supercar usually involves dealing with ridiculous salesmen who tell you the car is sold out or otherwise unavailable. This is especially true of Italian supercars. The idea of just calling McLaren and ordering my car was refreshing. They told me the list price and I paid it.

But what I found most fascinating when dealing with McLaren representatives was their honesty.

For example, McLaren wants the car to be as light as possible. That’s the mantra behind McLaren. They’re like Colin Chapman that way. So I figured I’d spec the carbon fiber brakes.

“What are you going to use the car for?” the McLaren guy asked.

“Mostly road use,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to do any track work with it.”

“Well, the steel brakes are lighter, and they’re cheaper,” he said.

“Oh, so you’re recommending the steel brakes?” I asked.

“Yeah. Unless you’re using it for track work and you’re really hard on the brakes, you don’t need the added expense,” he said.

So I said, “OK, I can save some money there, fine.”

As we went through the options, he suggested the carbon fiber kit.

“Oh, OK, the carbon fiber trim,” I said. “Does that save any weight?”

“No,” the McLaren guy replied. “It’s just decorative.”

“So I don’t need that?” No, came the reply, I don’t really need it. So I didn’t get it. And I got exactly what I wanted for a little less than I expected to pay. That’s what I find satisfying and endearing about buying this McLaren as opposed to some other cars I’ve bought over the years.

I feel a strong connection to the MP4-12C. I got a preview of the car during a visit to the UK in 2009, and I got a ride in it around the Top Gear track. I essentially placed my order then. About six weeks ago I officially went through the option list and configured the car McLaren is building for me.

I’ve gone for McLaren orange because to my eye, that’s the color. That’s the one that really makes the car pop. Unlike a lot of people, I like the styling of the MP4-12C. I like the understatedness of it. The McLaren F1 is a fantastic looking car, but if you don’t know cars that’s all it is — a fantastic looking car. If you know cars, you know exactly what it is. It doesn’t need to scream it from the rooftops. The MP4-12C is the kind of car that becomes beautiful once you see how well it gets the job done. To me it’s a bit like the bookish woman who takes her glasses off and lets her hair down and you realize she’s stunningly attractive.

Whenever I go to restaurants in Beverly Hills I always see people who want their Ferrari parked right in front of the valet. First of all, you don’t give a car like this to a valet. I don’t believe any McLaren owner would hand the key over to some kid. And I think that, if you’re buying a McLaren, you really don’t care if it’s parked in front of a restaurant. It’s whole different mindset.

Anyone who knows cars knows McLaren and what it stands for. I didn’t buy it to make a statement. I’m still with my first wife. I’m not driving around with a trophy wife who has a fake tan and fake boobs. I like to drive, I like the look and the feel of this car. That’s why I bought it.

Some reviewer said the MP4-12C could be mistaken for a Lotus. Anyone who makes that mistake is not a car person. Frankly, I don’t understand why people would be upset about the styling. To me, it’s styled that way because it works best that way. It’s not like someone just picked up a pen and drew something they thought was outrageous. In terms of airflow and dynamics and all that kind of stuff, that’s why it looks the way it does. Ten years from now it will still be a good-looking car. The McLaren F1 is 20 years old. Even now, people ask me if it’s the new this or the new that. And I always say no, it’s a McLaren F1, and it was built in 1994. People are always surprised. But when a car looks right, it looks right and it always looks right.

I remember when the F1 came out, before McLaren dominated Le Mans. People read the road tests and thought, “No car can be that good.” And it was a million dollars. That was crazy. So McLaren sold just 106 of them. If they built it today, I think they’d sell 300 or 400, maybe 500. Back then, there were so many supercars that didn’t quite make the grade. People weren’t happy with the Jaguar XJ220, for example, and there were a number of other supercars that left people thinking, “Yeah, yeah, it’s just another supercar.” People didn’t realize the level of engineering and passion that went into the F1. But McLaren has the name and reputation to sell a lot more cars now.

I think the MP4-12C will be much easier to own than the F1. That’s part of the idea behind the car. The F1 was a pet project, a bunch of guys doing it piecemeal on the side. There’s an old joke about the British that goes, “They can make one of anything. But when you say, ‘This is fantastic! I need two more!’ they say, ‘F–k.’”

Not so with the MP4-12C. This is McLaren’s attempt to become a proper automaker, one competing with the likes of Ferrari. I am really excited to see them pulling it off.

Photo: McLaren Automotive. Video: Inc/Incword.com

After Klout users learned this week that Foursquare activity would now affect Klout scores, many of them — particularly people who aren’t on Foursquare or who don’t regularly use the location-based service — were unsure about how the Foursquare integration would work.

That’s partly because the folks at Klout aren’t yet sure exactly how Foursquare will factor into the hush-hush Klout algorithm, which already considers Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to measure the online influence of social media users.

“We are still figuring this out,” Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told Mashable. “Obviously things like tips that turn into to-dos are interesting as is the ripple effect of a checkin through a network. In the next few weeks we’ll be testing and perfecting the algorithm.”

One thing Fernandez knows for certain, though, is Klout users’ scores will only go up once they add Foursquare to their Klout dashboards. “We use the network you are most influential on as the foundation for your score and then other networks are additive,” he said.

Fernandez added Foursquare to the scoring system because it has been a huge request from users and because “Foursquare is blowing up.”

For example, Foursquare recently teamed up with American Express to reward users with loyalty card-like credit when they check in. “The deals they are doing with AmEx and others show their impact is being felt wide by consumers and businesses,” he said.

Foursquare also just reached 10 million users, surpassed 500,000 merchant accounts, raised another $50 million and added targeted daily deals from LivingSocial, Gilt City, AT&T Interactive, BuyWithMe and Zozi.

“Foursquare integration is the start of an aggressive process from Klout to add more data sources and granularity to the Klout scores,” Fernandez said.

Does this mean we will see more services — maybe even Google+ — added to Klout’s scoring system? Only time will tell.