Kara Swisher has a useful "back to earth" tonic for all the cool kids who think Twitter (et. al.) is the biggest thing ever:

And so I asked a large group of people–about 30–and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0

FriendFeed: 0

Widget: 1 (but she thought it was one of the units used in a business class study).

Facebook: Everyone I asked knew about it and about half had an account, although different people used it differently.

This shouldn't really be a surprise, but I'm sure lots of techies will be surprised by it. Just as there are poitical junkies and news junkies, there are social media junkies - and the gap between when the junkie knows about some "big new thing" in their field of interest and when the "rest of the world" knows about it can be very, very large. Sometimes that gap is never crossed - and it's useful to keep that in mind.

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