everyone's a spare cyclist

Influx Insights — 2007-05-08T01:06:21Z

Chris Anderson recent Long Tail post suggests that “Spare Cycles” are behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon and have given rise to sites like; YouTube, MySpace, Friendster and tools like Twitter.

Anderson’s basic argument is people are bored and unfulfilled and will do anything to close the boredom gap. He uses the example of a Sheriff at a regional airport who only needs to work when there are passengers passing through security, since there’s an average of one plane an hour, that’s a lot of downtime which he uses to watch DVDs on a portable player.

Judging from some of the comments, it looks like not everyone agrees with Chris, some suggest the opposite is true; people are more frayed and frazzled than working 80 hour weeks and looking after four kids. However, the fact that the skeptics have the time to make comments vindicates Anderson’s theory.

You don’t have to be a sheriff in a slow moving airport to have spare cycles. Just look at Twitter, lots of busy, influential and important people (if we believe what we read) are using the thing.

Influx believes there are two groups of Spare Cyclists:

1.   People are under utilized in their jobs and have unproductive slices of time
2.   Others who are busy but realize they need to create Spare Cycles to refresh and recharge. These might not be hours at a time, but 15 minutes here and there.

Spare Cyclist Motivations are:

The “Two Bs”

1.   Boredom- People are easily bored. They don’t know how to cope with downtime because the principles of Zen and meditation have yet to reach mainstream status. People find it hard to relax.
2.   Belonging- People want to connect with others and use the downtime to create social interactions, keeping up with friends and making new contacts online.

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everyone's a spare cyclist