Ryan, I hope I'm not participating in the spirit of your argument when I say that I think your examples are flawed.

The Google Buzz launch and Facebook's redesigns are not failures of a hype-to-heckle cycle. It's the opposite--the backlashes originate from too much change too fast. If Facebook users can't even figure out how to log into the service--see the recent ReadWriteWeb incident--how do we expect them to react when the user experience of the site is radically reoriented? And I don't remember any hype for Google Buzz because the surprise release of a confusing social layer inside of Gmail was drowned in complaints from its inception.

Too much, too fast. It's not because we were expecting more, it's because we were expecting less.

To my mind, the lessons from those backlashes is to introduce changes slowly. People are proprietary about their software, and just because web applications are malleable doesn't mean there's not a breaking point for users.

Your examples on a hype-to-heckle cycle for disruptive technologies like the iPhone and the iPad are well noted and salient. The disillusionment surrounding Barack Obama deserves a graduate thesis in its own right.

Joseph Price
Technological Analyst

@Joseph - Fair points. I should have better defined the argument for Facebook and Google - for them, it's not the PRODUCTS (Facebook.com and Buzz) that have been subject to the hype-to-heckle cycle (i'm stealing that heretofore), it's the brands themselves.

Facebook was seen as the savior to the horribly blighted and out of touch MySpace, and Google was seen as both benevolent AND open. Both, however, have fallen from nerd grace, and are now judged with a heavy dash of cynicism, with any new product they release being judged first with skepticism.

Though you DO make a valid point about too much too soon (though I'm one of the few who finds the new NEW Facebook far more successful, from a UX POV).

And we're all participating. That's the point. ;)

Situations like what we've seen with Buzz, Facebook, and the iPad play themselves out every day at the most granular level with every book, record, blog post, and celebrity DUI that dares to show its face online. Is the problem that we have become less civil as as culture, and less interested in (or even capable of) developing thoughtful, defensible responses to those who fuel that very culture (be they corporations, celebrities, politicians, authors, talk radio hosts, et al.)? Or is it that the *means* of interacting has become dehumanized, thus greasing the downward slope of the conversation into name-calling and snarkiness?

I'd argue that there is a degree of the former going on, but I suspect that a lot of it comes from the latter. The "relationships" we have with many of our so-called "friends" on Facebook are nothing more than pissing matches about who can make the cleverest quip the fastest or generate the most "like" votes for content they didn't even create. Twitter is a seemingly endless parade of self-promoting solipsists shouting into the already cacophonous breeze. Blog comments allow us to anonymously post inflammatory, hate-filled, and completely consequence-free remarks to blogs, turning the author's attention away from generating original ideas and toward refereeing a cage match of cavemen. These symptoms all point to what I see as an underlying flaw in the technosphere we have created either actively (as content creators, web site developers, software engineers, hardware manufacturers) or passively (as members of these "communities"): it's just too easy and inexpensive to be thoughtless, aggressive, and self-absorbed in a virtual world that has largely zero repercussions.

Low cost. No consequences. It's inevitable that the situation is going to deteriorate.

Jaron Lanier's new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is really resonating with me as a I read it. I realize now how so many of the motivations of the internet's/web's early visionaries for democratizing content creation, for delivering on the promise of true interactivity between corporations/governments and individuals, and for creating an open system that flattens the earth (for anyone with access, anyway) have largely been corrupted on their way to the promised land. Everyone may now have a voice, but if all they use it for is to shout obscenities at one another and shake their virtual pitchforks like an angry, mindless mob at the walls of the castle, I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Keith Butters over here points me to "the risky shift" and group polarization as underlying subcurrents as to why this behavior manifests online:

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Risky_shift

I do agree that the web as a whole has gotten more vicious as it's become more anonymous, though the comments here are perfectly delightful.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the Facebook redesign -- about the seemingly endless parade of Facebook redesigns, in fact -- and I'm beginning to wonder whether they aren't actually part of a very conscious strategy. If we are continuously being asked to re-learn the interface, or to learn a new one, we are constantly re-committing to and refreshing our individual relationships with the Facebook brand. We aren't taking it for granted and letting it grow stale. Yes, there's the risk that Facebook might come across as looking like it doesn't care for us, like it's jerking us around... but as long as they make changes in the make of an improved user experience, and they really succeed at it... isn't it a good thing? And isn't the heckling really just a natural inclination to be upset when we're momentarily estranged from something familiar? A feeling that soon enough dissipates?

I love this - two other areas that I think come into play:

1) The media got on the internet. In the olden dayz, we had our little chat rooms where we discussed apple products, and the wall street journal was none the wiser. We could make in-jokes borne of love - you can call your own mother dumb but no one else can. Once the media was in there, and our chat rooms migrated to facebook and twitter and more findable, public forums, the media amplified all of this.

2) This one's esoteric and I'm not sure i can make it make sense: There is a segment of the population that is passionate about "the future" - about space age and gadgets and whizz bang, etc. I'm not belittling. You know the group. I think, as technology speeds up, and people like Apple have pulled rabbits out of their hat, people have increasingly experienced the sensation of feeling the future actually get closer in a measurable way in one fell swoop. And they're becoming addicted to it. So when they think one of those moments are coming, and it doesn't, they are hit even harder than they would have been otherwise.

@Rick, per your second point, I think you're right. And these aren't the nerds who whine that their Nokia N7900XX could cut and paste in 2002.

I actually think I'm one of them.

The night I got home with one of the first iPhones, I remember sitting on my couch with it beside me, and I just kept staring at it, thinking: This is the future. This is what we were promised. A sliver of glass and metal that sits in your pocket and does unimaginable things.

Funny thing is, I feel the same about the iPad. Call me an optimist, but I see what it will do, not what it currently doesn't.