Morbus Iff:

"Now, sure, XML-RPC is not for end users - my dog could gleefully lick his dogbowl, ignoring the fact that I'm SOAPing the amount of water in his bowl so that I can be Jabber'd when he needs more. [...] We all know XML-RPC, we all know some aspects of XML, we all know how to code in something or other. But we're not recognizing the person who just called me and said she never knew her mouse had a right button for clicking."

Morbus might have gotten a little carried away here, but he has at least half a point. I recently showed a friend how I aggregate many news sources with RadioUserland. He said "Hmm. Neat. I don't see how that could be useful to me though."

We - the community of online addicts - think that keeping in touch with news as they happen, and being able to connect to other people through blogs or IM, is oh so very cool. Using all this stuff must obviously become easier to cross the chasm and reach the layman. But however easy these apps are, they won't catch if people are not interested. What if the majority of people don't want to go beyond having a beer and watching the game? Maybe some "lost" generations just don't care (say, people born before 1975 and not already online). For teens it's probably so natural (to blog, IM, whatever) it's not even worth mentioning.