Reality check after Mobilewebcamp Hasselt

Saturday I attended the first mobile webcamp in Belgium. It took place in Hasselt in the nice building of Kaai16. The organisation was spot on, the food was great and it sported some of the best presentations I've seen in years. Other blog posts cover the event more in depth. Check it out on http://mobilewebcamp.wikispaces.com/

But at the end of the day I had an experience that changed my view on the whole internet movement. I had to leave the mobile webcamp early to attend a wedding. It was there that I was confronted with the way normal people look at the internet.

It all started when someone noticed that I was constantly receiving SMS messages. I explained it was the twitter updates from the mobilewebcamp. This triggered some interest, some a few people gathered around me to check out the messages. Of course, they didn't have a clue of what the messages meant.

To give them an idea, I twittered "Herwig sees twitter for the first time and wanders what is interesting about someone telling he is eating an icecream. Help me out". Whilst walking from the buffet back to the table, I received 3 responses to this tweet. The response from maxvoltar got some people thinking: "Now that I know that Herwig likes icecones, I can offer him one when I would meet him"

This resulted in a big argument about children that prefer Playstation over playing with their imagination, about society becoming more an more unsocial, about how the young generation can no longer communicate (this is said by people from between 20 and 30 years old...) and how the internet is ruining everything.

I believe this is a normal reaction. We have seen the same thing when the telephone was introduced, when TV became mainstream and when email replaced paper post.

This experience taught me where we are on the adoption curve: Out of 100 "ordinary" Belgians, only 1 knew about twitter (me). This corresponds to the findings that only 10% of internet users is reading blogs and only 1% is contributing content. Since we, internet-folks, are following internet media instead of popular newspapers, our view on the world tends to be quite distorted.

When Citylive develops mobile solutions, they need to appeal to the average citizen. So let's go easy on the flash, ajax and html mashup-things. Save that for the geeks. For normal humans, Citylive has GLOWE!