Every industry has a certain level of insularity. It’s human nature to want to be part of the in crowd and knowing the buzzwords and inner workings of a sector carries cache. The emerging tech industry, though, takes insularity to a whole other level. It’s easy to get caught up in the morass of social services and tools; a day spent immersed in tweets and status updates, FriendFeed links and Seesmic videos can easily cloud one’s mind. Spend enough time in here and you find yourself wondering why the gas company doesn’t just send your bills via Twitter. (On second thought, that’s a hell of an idea…) So it’s always a pleasant surprise to talk to my stay-at-home-mom friends, the ones I dragged kicking and screaming to Facebook. They give me a much needed reality check as to what’s going on in the real world.

I had one of those conversations this morning with my friend Polly, who is marginally tech-savvy, mainly because she’s too busy raising three boys to be otherwise. We talked about several tech-related issues, some of which I’ll post about in the coming days. But perhaps the most interesting talk concerned Facebook, in which she bemoaned the hesitance of some of our friends to join the site. She’s surprised to find that a few of her friends won’t consider a Facebook profile; that there was even a level of disgust at the idea. We threw around a couple of theories but I suspect the answer is pretty simple: ego. There is an air of ego – mistaken in my opinion – around Facebook and social networking in general. From the point of view of my generation and older, Web 2.0 is about ego: telling people what you’re doing at the moment, referring to articles you’re reading, posting pictures of yourself and the parties you go to – all actions that are second-nature to younger generations but anathema to anyone born before 1973 (or so).

Here’s my point: these services we’re building and testing and funding – where are they headed? For what mass audience are they intended? Take FriendFeed. I love it, you love it, we’re all (mostly) in agreement that they’ve built a nifty little service for those of us inside baseball. But how am I supposed to explain it to someone who’s never heard of an RSS reader? Someone who exclaimed, “Wow, you can do that?” when I described Google Reader to her? She wants to know about FriendFeed but I don’t even know where to begin. “Well, first you create an account at six or seven different services that you’ve also never heard of…”

I know I harp on this often but we desperately need to take all this fantastic innovation and share it with the outside world. The fact that many people think Facebook to be an ego trip (and equate it with the less-mature MySpace) is our fault. The fact that RSS still hasn’t made it to the mainstream is our fault. We’re the insiders with a wealth of knowledge and fulfilling tech experiences to share. The point of evangelizing is to win new converts, not to continue preaching to the already converted. Isn’t that the definition of insanity – doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result?

I’m not entirely sure who I’m directing this rant towards. Perhaps it’s to everyone who has forgotten the larger audience – bloggers, pundits, marketing strategists, investors and entrepreneurs alike. We need to broaden our reach, talk to everyday consumers about their technology uses, likes, and dislikes. Think past the TechCrunch reviews while building a product and plan for its uses in the real world.

While there is certainly a stage at which a product needs to be honed first within the industry, we should recognize the point at which it’s time to take it to the masses. Time to take the acronyms off and present it to consumers in a manner they can understand. Time to build products that will extend beyond our secluded little world. Time, it seems, to stop staring at our navels.

**Update: Just after I posted this entry, I came across this on LaughingSquid. A series of short videos featuring people describing Twitter, it’s a perfect illustration of the disconnect between technology insiders and mass consumers. Evan Williams is a brilliant guy who built two fantastic products – but he needs to learn friendlier language that will appeal to mass consumers. Alex North’s description wins my vote – a real-world case for using Twitter.

Disclaimer: I am chair of the Board of Directors of the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives. The following event is organized by FWE&E, although I’ve not been actively involved with its planning.

Later this month, the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives, the Bay Area’s most active forum for women in leadership roles, will host the half-day conference “Business Applications of Social Networking.” The event will be held Tuesday, March 25th at the Computer History Museum and is being underwritten by Google.

Unlike other events on the topic are designed for social media insiders or that serve as an arena for platform wars, this event is designed to help business leaders better understand and extract value from social networks. This time-efficient conference isn’t about platform or profiles; it’s about leveraging social media and networking tools for your business. Speakers include:

• Ross Mayfield, Chairman, President & Co-founder, Socialtext;
• Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester Research;
• Karen Appleton, VP Business Development, Box.net;
• Katie Jacobs Stanton, Principal, New Business Development,Google, Inc;
• Teresa Valdez Klein, Director of Web Operations, Parnassus Ventures;
• Lena West, CEO & Founder, xynoMedia Technology;
• Robin Wolaner, Founder and CEO, TeeBeeDee; and
• Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning.

If you’ve wondered how to make Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, or any of the dozens of social networking tools more pertinent to your business, I recommend you register for and attend this practical, time-efficient conference. Early registration discounts expire March 7.

I saw a great post this morning from Kristen Nicole at Mashable. She covered several of her favorite companies here at DEMO, including good2gether, Redux, and Huddle. What got me thinking though, was a point in her intro.

I thought perhaps I’d be able to organize this roundup by grouping the type of company. However, each of these companies is so different, that such organization turned out to be quite impossible. This observation can be applied to more than just this handful of companies I’m covering in this post, which speaks to the deeper integration and cultivating of niche capabilities that is a product of our current application economy.

It’s a point that merits further consideration: the tech economy, once easily classifiable into broad strokes – enterprise, consumer, software, hardware – has transmuted into a rich landscape of niches. Even a newer label like ‘social Web’ no longer fits; one has to append it with ‘shopping,’ ‘graph,’ ‘storytelling,’ etc etc.

It’s the natural evolution of tech cycles and sure to be repeated many more times down the road. One big revolution hits the tech sector – the Internet, mobility, Web 2.0 – and a thousand (or more) companies follow in its wake, attempting their own spin on the same story. Once the dust settles, interesting little ideas begin to pop up; innovative angles on the original big concept that remind us of just how much ingenuity exists in the tech world.

As Kristen notes, this is readily apparent at DEMO this week. Now that every possible niche social network has been created, it’s time to play around and see where the social Web can really take us. There are a myriad of directions in which to go and DEMO is exploring several of those. Some great examples: YouChoose, a distributed commenting widget that brings much needed critical mass to a highly disparate space; Standout Jobs, bringing social media tools to recruiting efforts; Delver, a search service based on your social graph; and Movial, a company putting the social graph in your pocket.

There are more notable companies exploring new niches in technology. We’ll take a look at few more intriguing themes later today.

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