Mr. Caldecutt sports thin-framed spectacles and a sparse red beard and currently works as a publicist for Trylon SMR, a public relations firm that specializes in representing technology, media and telecommunications companies. He practically made a career out of testing and trying out new online communication systems, Web applications and trendy mobile phones. Like his fellow “early adopters”—the passionate Web nerds who try out the latest Internet tools and wacky gadgets—he has helped to shape our future with technology. We might think they are regular geeks, clamoring for beta invites publicized on blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable, itching to test out Internet platforms and programs while they’re still in the embryonic stage. But early adopters not only help spread the word about a new product—like a army of nerdy PR agents for the Internet—they also help develop it by offering feedback to its creators. They were the ones flashing their new iPhone long before it became the hottest tech toy on the market, and emailing Apple that the map function had inaccurate information. They bugged you to join Facebook ages before everyone from grandma to the president was signing up for it, and told its developers to make the “is” in status updates optional. “As soon as it becomes available, I’ll try it,” Mr. Caldecutt said. He has used hundreds of Web services you’ve probably never heard of, like Dodgeball, a mobile social networking software founded by two New York University students that will text your friends your exact location.

Yet more and more people in their teens, 20s and even 30s seem to be making early adoption a new, cheap hobby (most beta invites for Web products are free). “Some of the training wheels are off,” Mr. Caldecutt said. “There’s still a long way to go. [Some Web products] are complicated to use and, in many ways, they are very geeky. But among the younger, hip segment of the population, the bracket has gotten wider.” And they are communicating about these new Internet tools through social networking sites—Twittering away their complaints about Twitter—to help get the rest of us on the bandwagon.

Seth Godin, the best-selling author and self-described “agent of change” whose latest book is titled Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, is a kind of evangelist for early adopters. “Today the people who got made fun of in high school—they are the ones who matter so much. They’re the ones shaping new technology that diffuses to the masses,” he told The Observer in a phone interview from his Westchester County office. “The reason you need to care about early adopters, even if you aren’t one, is because this small group of people are going to change your world.”

Of course, there are all kinds of early adopters; Mr. Godin explained that you can find them in every industry, from environmentalists to fashion fetishists. “Women who read Vogue are early adopters,” he told The Observer. “They are the ones who wait in line at Bergdorf’s to buy the new Manolos. And those same women might be early adopters in that they bought cell phones at 6 years old.”

According to a theory called Diffusion of Innovations, formulated by Everett Rogers in his 1962 book of the same name, early adopters make up 13.5 percent of the population. “Diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system,” he wrote. Now that these social systems are online, and more young people are joining them, the word gets around a little faster than it did back in the ’60s, when we relied on newspapers and advertisers to tell us about the most exciting new innovations. No one has estimated what the percentage of population might be considered early adopters now, but it’s growing all the time.

“Because there are so many more online communities and social networking programs and everything, it’s probably a lot easier for a typical, mainstream, everyday technology user to know someone who is an early adopter,” said Whitney Hess, a user experience designer who helps companies make their product more friendly for the mainstream. “They’re hearing about the evolution of early products much more than they used to. Everyone wants to know about the latest and greatest.”

Internet companies pay attention to early adopters because they basically operate as free developers, helping to make their product better. Some early adopters will champion a shiny new Web product on their blog or Twitter accounts, only to abandon it and take the mainstream folks along with them. (Remember Friendster? Buh-bye!) So companies need to keep early adopters interested by staying relative and innovative—and maybe offering discounts or rebates once the product officially launches, too. (Think of when Steve Jobs offered a $200 refund to all those early adopters who bought the first, very expensive version of the iPhone.)

Ms. Hess is currently working for Boxee, the multimedia software with social networking features that has the early adopters in a frenzy. She has been interviewing Boxee users, from the 20-something, high-tech savants to moms in rural New York about why they use Boxee and how it can be tailored to suit wider audiences. “Mainstream users aren’t that different from early adopters in that they can be equally tech savvy,” Ms. Hess explained. “It’s a difference in patience, maybe, an interest in wading through the early flaws and kinks. Some people don’t have that level of tolerance or ability to commit that time.”

They may be a little nerdy, scheming behind their glowing screens, but we should all pay attention to these tech freaks who are shaping the goodies we’ll be wanting for Christmas next year. Bijan Sabet, general partner at early stage investment company Spark Capital in Boston, said that “the early adopter group drives everything.” His company has invested in products that excite early adopters, including Boxee and blogging platforms Twitter and Tumblr.

Mr. Sabet said early adopters can be a prickly group—attacking company owners with venomous emails and blog posts, criticizing their programs when they are in their earliest, most fragile stages. But some offer helpful advice, submit user-generated content and even develop additional applications to help show companies their product’s potential. Mr. Sabet brought up Jacob Bijani, a young graduate of the Art Institute of California in San Diego, who started building layout themes for Tumblr for free, just because he liked the blogging platform. Mr. Bijani’s work was so impressive that the company hired him as their new creative director last December.

He also mentioned a blog post written in March by New York–based venture capitalist Fred Wilson titled “Ten Things I’d Like FriendFeed to Do.” Mr. Wilson suggested some changes to the Web service, which aggregates photos, music and other content submitted by friends from other networking sites into a simple feed. He wanted photo thumbnails, playable mp3s and easier comment management. Bret Taylor, who co-founded FriendFeed along with three other former Google employees, wrote in the comments section of the post, “I agree with you on almost every single request,” and some of the changes were implemented soon thereafter.

Clearly, early adopters are important. But companies also have to worry about losing sight of the moms, pops and great aunts of the Internet world. We don’t all think like our geeky IT guy, so how do we get what we want out of these gadgets and Web sites? Can we be early adopters, too?

We can, but it’s still up to the industry to keep users—all of us—satisfied. “It’s really tough to take the company over that seemingly unsurmountable chasm and going to the other side,” said Ken Berger, president of LogX Technologies, who consults investors and entreprenuers in Web-based start-up companies. He put Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs, current CEO of Apple, on the short list of company leaders who ushered early adopter products into the mainstream. They were successful because they had a two-pronged approach—they wooed the early adopters and kept them happy with inventive innovations while also appealing to the mainstream by making their products user-friendly for everyone (and pretty, too).

President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign team had a similar plan, using traditional campaign tactics like town hall speeches, handshaking and baby holding. But they also used Twitter, iPhone applications and their own social networking Web site to mobilize early adopters and spread support for Mr. Obama. He had the best of both worlds.

Still, Mr. Berger said, despite all the advancements, “the vast majority of people out there are afraid of the technology. It could just be too esoteric or too exotic for general use, but the majority of people push away at that.”

But what are we so afraid of?

Meghan Asha, 28, of Soho, an early adopter who blogs as a “geekette” under the NonSociety network (where Julia Allison also dispatches her dating advice), said signing on to new technology is essential to modern life. “It’s survival of the fittest, actually, we’re learning to change our brains,” she said, somewhat disturbingly, calling in from Las Vegas at the International Consumer Electronics Show, the gadget convention for tech fetishists. “People that haven’t been in this generation, who grew up with new technology all around them, they need to keep up.”

Let that be a warning call. And if it’s still too scary for you, at least start following your techie friend’s Twitter. How cool would it be to watch her shape the next TiVo?

greagan@observer.com