I’m an Early Adopter. I like to be among the first to try out new products and services. If you were looking for me on the Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle–the bell-shaped curve that’s a favorite of product managers–you’d find me on left side of the curve, just after the truly courageous Innovators but before the onset of the rabble of the Early Majority.

Being an early adopter means that sometimes I’ve been left in the lurch when a product or service I adopted early failed or was pulled inexplicably from the market. Were you also a user of Pownce, Yahoo Photos, or Google Notebook? Everything has a natural lifecycle, of course, and I have to expect that some of the products I (perhaps too eagerly) embraced will not survive.

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Ariel Waldman says she’s been harassed over Twitter for close to a year and the company has refused to do anything about it, despite the fact that it violates their own terms of service.
Waldman, a community manager at Pownce, says a longtime stalker launched a campaign against her over Twitter in June 2007. When she contacted the company about the tweets, somebody said they took them down from the public time line. As the tweets continued to stream in, Waldman says she periodically reported them to Twitter.

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The question of business-model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some start-up. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f’ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a start-up come out of the gate with a business model–perhaps it’s the accountant in me.

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