3 Underutilized Technologies You Should Adopt Today

There are common technologies and services in existence today that continue to be rebuffed by far more people than they should.  This group of people probably have and use Facebook, own or regularly use an iPod and can send and receive email attachments with ease.  These are ‘normal’ people who would typically be considered to be reasonably tech-savvy and in the early to middle of the road adopters group.

I’m going to list reasons these are not adopted, reasons they should be and a score for how hard it would be to adopt it where 1 is super easy, and 10 is hard. Here are three that I’ve identified and feel strongly about today:

3.  Mac OS X

The growth in quality of OS X as a Windows replacement has been a long time coming.

Reasons it is not adopted: Too expensive to buy a mac, unfamiliar methods for doing common things “I know how to do” in Windows, not seen as business ready.

Reasons it should be: The added expense is worth it in design and customer service, the new ways of doing old things require only minor variation in user behavior, you can run your legacy business tools on Windows in a Parallels window.

Difficulty of Adoption: 6.   Four points for learning how to launch programs and handle files in a new operating system. 2 points for the expense.  Great Macbooks can be found for less than $700 on Craigslist!

2. Lala

Reasons it is not adopted: I’ve never heard about it

Reasons it should be: Apple purchased this company because Lala negotiated an excellent set of deals with the recording industry.  These deals allow you to stream (almost) your complete mp3 collection from any computer anywhere in the world.  Forget bringing over your iPod to your friend’s house, just log into Lala there and boom you’ve got all your tunes via the internets.

Difficulty of Adoption: 2.  You have to download the Lala “Music Mover” which actually just scans your music collection and tells Lala what it is ok for you to stream.  This is a no-brainer, do it now.

1. Twitter

Reasons it is not adopted: Irrational fear of change, confusion over how it works, concern that the service is used for mindless updates only.

Reasons it should be: If you graduated from respecting only your local newspaper to allowing for reading the New York Times on the web, you are also ready to get updates via Twitter.  Anything is confusing if you have dedicated almost zero time learning about it. Yes, there are tons of mindless updates but also some of the world’s greatest known and unknown luminaries are sharing their thoughts and links.  You can screen out the silly people, you just don’t follow them.

Difficulty of Adoption: 6.  Four points for getting over your prideful indulgence that you already have as much information access as you need.  Two points for the time you’ll have to spend finding people to follow, what it means to @reply and what a RT is.