A snapshot of AllTop

I spoke with someone this weekend who had never heard of Flickr, and wasn’t really aware of how, why or where anyone would upload and share photos on the web. Honestly, I was shocked, and not simply because this person was in his early 30s rather than his late 70s.

Approximately 25 million people visit Flickr.com each month, in the US alone, and the site is certainly a global phenomenon that was instrumental in defining the concept of web 2.0. For many, Flickr was their first introduction to the concept of “sharing” information on the web, and it turned something that used to be very difficult (distributing your digital photos to anyone) into a spectacularly easy task. In turn, the reason we find it so easy to use Facebook and other social networking tools has a lot to do with Flickr having made us comfortable with participation in large online communities.

But still, there are 30-year-olds out there for whom Flickr remains completely alien, and apparently unnecessary. Which got me thinking about the assumptions we make about how we, and our behavior, are representative of the world at large.

Yesterday we were flattered to have our website added to AllTop, Guy Kawasaki’s aggregator of the best stories on the web (look for us in the Women and Life categories. But when AllTop launched it received a certain amount of scorn and derision from the so-called early adopter crowd. But of course, as Guy notes in a comment on his blog post about the launch, “It’s a good sign if TC and its readers hate a product like this.” By which he simply means that AllTop is for the vast majority of web users who still aren’t living inside their RSS readers, and need a more gentle introduction into the vast pool of, living, breathing and frantically reproducing content that now exists online.

It’s not surprising that people assume everyone else is like them (why else would we get so livid about topics like politics — “how on earth could someone believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be VP?!!”), but it’s particularly dangerous in business. If you assume your customers are just like you, and it turns out that they aren’t, then you’re doomed to failure from the outset. In the tech. community, time and time again, I hear expressions of agonized frustration (”why don’t they get it!”), which is really nothing more than ignorance about the market. The market doesn’t “get it” or “not get it”; it simply is or isn’t like you expect it to be, and almost all of the time you simply can’t change that.

In fact many of our frustrations in life are about an unwillingness to accept that a good part of the world is the way it is, and won’t shape itself around our anger and frustration. But at the same time, this reality is perhaps where the largest opportunities exist. If you can simplify something complex, rather than attempt to force people to understand something complex, you’ll get exponentially further. It’s why reasoned, intelligent discussion and elegant answers to questions lots of people are asking are what produce real innovation.