Web 2.0 and the ‘tech elite’

I was interested in this survey asking ‘do Web 2.0 solutions solve problems only the tech elite have?’ It seems to be referring to more ‘tecchy’ applications specifically, rather than mainstream stuff like facebook.
So far it’s almost even with ‘Yes! Regular people choose a social network and stick to it, geeks join every one and then need FriendFeed’ and ‘Sometimes. My mother may never need FriendFeed, but a few years in, she’s digging Gmail.’
I was interested in it because a lot of people blogging about social action and web 2.0 seem very into twitter, like Beth Kanter which the survey blurb describes as ‘particularly geek only’. I set up a twitter feed for this blog because I was curious to see how it worked: (twitter feed here), though I haven’t really done anything with it (I’m not ‘following’ anyone or vice versa). I can see though, if you’re involved in a group trying to achive something collaborative, or share ideas, like the social media group are doing, that twitter could be a pretty useful tool.
However, it got me thinking about the actual importance, and prevalence, of all Web 2.0 tools. One of my university tutors from Sri Lanka was surprised that pretty much no-one had a blog, apart from a couple of people who contribute to a work based log – she kind of assumed it would be more popular. Blogs though, can be quite a bit of work and have to be sustainable subject wise.
I know that most people I know have a facebook account (not me, though) and most of them are still relatively active. That’s a pretty homogenous group though. There are still a lot of people out there who don’t use social networking on the web. I think it’d be interesting to see how many people who use for example the IMH site that we’re working on the project for use social technology already, and how many who don’t who would be interested in it.
I think what I’m trying to say is, there’s a lot of focus on Web 2.0 type applications, and there’s stronge evidence to say there is a drip down effect from the early ‘geek only’ adopters, but how many people do find it isolating/excluding? A kind of Web 2.0 digital divide.
I actually do see a very strong benefit from a lot of Web 2.0 stuff- or I wouldn’t be doing this blog, but it’s always worth considering the other side!