One of the biggest challenges that Micro.blog faces with its upcoming public launch is how to make the jump beyond its early adopter base of blog enthusiasts to “regular people”. It’s tempting to daydream about everyone from teenagers to grandmothers abandoning their social media silos en masse and simultaneously raising “Indie Blogger” flags, but that’s probably not realistic.
It’s also not the right measurement of success.
Micro.blog doesn’t need to achieve Facebook-level ubiquity or turn non-technical people into IndieWeb true believers in order to achieve mainstream success. It just needs to zero in on real-world use cases that it can meet more effectively than existing options, starting with the ones that people will be most likely to pay for.
A few candidates that I’ve been thinking about are:
- Micro-communities
- Events
- Simple small business web presence
I’m going to write a post about each of these three topics over the next week or so to see I can give my loose ideas further definition.
In the end, they may all be bad ideas, but one of the things that has been fun about Micro.blog so far is that its users’ ideas about how the service can improve and evolve over time are heard and valued.
Sharing ideas that have a small chance of making your social network better is much more enjoyable than complaining into a void about how Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg are doing it wrong.
What ideas do you have about how Micro.blog can attract mainstream users when it launches?
