RSS Feed 
Email
How big is your bubble?
I find generational labels fascinating. As if a group of people whose age spans 20+ years can be summed up and boxed away neatly. I understand the merits of this and the purpose but there are people out there who treat this stuff as market dogma. The teen group seems to be quite popular these days — I bring this up because during my usual morning “reading time” I stumbled across the following in a VentureBeat article:
This may be obvious to many of you, but I was also struck by how isolated the teens seemed from all the cool new tech that Silicon Valley nerds are excited about. None of them owned an iPhone, or any of the newer smartphones. They still used Google for all their web searches and only seemed vaguely aware of Microsoft’s search engine Bing. And while almost everyone I know uses Gmail for their personal email, one teen (a boy) declared, “Hot girls use Hotmail.”
At least the author starts off by saying “this may be obvious to many of you” so he’s at least aware that the bubble he lives in may be relatively small. When I first read the paragraph above I thought to myself: You’ve just described 90% of the world population.
The Bubble Calculator
I think it is important to step back once in a while and make sure you’re still aware of what’s going on outside of the bubble you live in. Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in all the hype and forget that the world does not consist solely of the 100 km2 around your home. That being said I think most would agree that all of us live in a bubble of some size (some larger than others) but I’ve come up with a scientific approach that is 100% accurate to determine the size of your tech bubble based on your answers to a few simple questions and a complex scoring system. Note that this has nothing to do with speculative bubbles…this is about the bubbles people live in that prevent them from seeing beyond what they’re comfortable or accustomed to. A small bubble means you don’t get out much.
| On a scale of 1 to 5 rate how true the following statements are in your opinion (1 being a complete falsehood, and 5 being the absolute truth) |
|
| Everybody has an iPhone | (1-5) |
| Everybody is on Twitter | (1-5) |
| Everybody uses Bing | (1-5) |
| Everybody uses Gmail | (1-5) |
| Twitter is misunderstood | (1-5) |
| I live in a very small bubble | (1-5) |
|
Score |
Your Tech Bubble Size |
|
1 – 2 |
Supersized: Well traveled (or read). You know what’s going on…everywhere in the world! |
|
2 – 3 |
Large: When you talk about ‘people’ or ‘users’, you’re referring to a group that spans an entire continent…not just the ones you have lattes with on Tuesday mornings |
|
3 – 4 |
Medium: You know what’s going on in your own country…that’s about it. |
|
4 – 4.5 |
Small: You have heard of or are aware that people live beyond the city limits but aren’t sure what they’re up to or how they live |
|
4.5 – 5 |
Tiny: You believe that if you travel beyond a city block from your home you will fall off into the abyss…there is nothing else out there |
· trackback ·
October 28th, 2009 at 8:59 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by David Crow, Pete Frisella. Pete Frisella said: new blog post "How big is your bubble?" http://bit.ly/46fxLz [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Absolutely brilliant Pete. You made me laugh out loud.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:35 am
Hey! I picked 5 for everything on only got a bubble size of 4.5. I feel cheated that my bubble has been en unexpectedly inflated!
Srsly – great point.
October 29th, 2009 at 7:46 am
You can’t score a 5 Jim nor should you aspire to do so