We are early adopters. We use. We try. We evangelize. We bury. We filter.

That’s what we think anyway.

In reality, we are pretty useless.

Late last year, Amazon released the Kindle to the joy and enthusiasm of many early adopters. Robert Scoble, the poster child for early adopters, gleefully got his Kindle on the first day and wrote about how beautiful it was and how it brought him great pleasure. One week later, he hated the Kindle listing a laundry list of problems from usability to the inability to send gifts to other Kindle owners.

Increasingly, I’m seeing common people (read: non-tech early adopters) who own and love the Kindle. And the numbers bear that out, if we’re to believe TechCrunch’s statement that by 2010, Amazon will have sold $750M in Kindles or 1-3% of the company’s total revenue. (Update: For clarity, the TechCrunch article cites a CitiGroup analyst and is not the authoritative assessment of TechCrunch. My point is, that’s where I heard the number in the first place – regardless of the original source.)

Brad Feld, a few years ago, wrote an amazing article titled The First 25,000 Users are Irrelevant which talks about the effect of early adopters on companies and products. As the oh-too-typical scenario goes, TechCrunch or Mashable covers a new product, there is a surge of traffic, registration or sign-ups for private beta invites from early adopters, or “tire kickers” then they go away. Some remain and become “evangelists” for the company or product, but most people don’t even care. Later on, if the company has mainstream staying power, the real buy-in will happen organically and without the say-so of the early adopters who largely came and went.

See, we like to tell people we are filters. We like to think we are influencers and powerful. We like to think we have an inside angle on what works and what doesn’t work, but we are just small insignificant people in the grand scheme of things, and largely irrelevant.

Amazon knows this. They don’t really care about us. And that’s why they might hit the $750M mark by 2010 and completely bypass the early adopters, placing their Kindle directly in the hands of mainstream commuters and book lovers.

Update: Corvida at SheGeeks thinks this is generational and writes a thoughtful and intelligent argument about this. However, I’m not convinced that everything is generational. I think early adoption is also a result of personalities.