The thin line between embracing change and being critical

Do you recognise the following? Suddenly there’s a lot of buzz about a new hype, everybody is talking about it and if you haven’t tried it yet, you are definately lagging behind.
Now you have to decide: will you hop onboard and give $hip_new_tech a try or are you skeptical and wait it out?

Sometimes a new technology has obvious advantages, which makes it easy to accept. Other things need some time to show their merits, or need a certain user base to become useful.

Following are some examples, I only have experience with some of them, so feel free to comment or add your own!

VCS vs. DVCS

In the recent years, several distributed source control systems, such as Git, Mercurial and Bazaar, have emerged. Centralised systems are mostly common practice at most projects and a lot of (mostly open source) projects have already switched to or are thinking about switching to a distributed one.
The distributed systems have some nice perks, everybody has the whole repository (i.e., better offline support), sharing commits without submitting them to the central server, local branches and more. On the other hand, they require learning the new tool, which can take a lot of time, especially with the less tech-savvy coworkers.
I’ve been using Git for a few years now. For a previous project, we were able to fully switch to Git with our team. This was my idea and it meant I had to take up some Git support work every now and then, but it was fun and provided the abovementioned advantages. In the projects that followed, the main repository was Subversion, but there is a Subversion connector for Git, which works fine for daily use. It has a few inconveniences, like not committing the removal of directories to Subversion, so someone else has to clean them up. For the rest, it’s great.

The cloud

Another hip thing is ‘the cloud’, which allows you to host web sites, run applications and store stuff somewhere in a giant network. It sounds really scalable, you only pay what you use and most of the management is done by the cloud provider. There are some risks: you might need to modify the application to make it work, security and encryption could become more of an issue and there are new tools to get used to (e.g., for deployment and configuration).

NoSQL vs. RDBMS

The NoSQL-movement has gained a lot of momentum, known implementations include CouchDB, Jackrabbit, Cassandra and BigTable. It advocates that most data can be treated a lot less strict than old-style databases do. Think foreign keys, strict data types and designated master/slave servers. When true, this improves performance, flexibility and scalability, but you need to think through your decision, as some data really needs to have a restricted format.

Social networking: blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn

Internet has enabled new forms of communication, and every few years, a new one is invented.
First came blogs, then Twitter and LinkedIn. Now most sites have an array of icons to submit the current article to one of many networking sites.
Twitter has brought news reporting to everyone, blogs allow even me to say stuff to the world, networking sites help you to find people with common areas of interest.
They do however cost a lot of time and effort, which might intervene with other activities. Anybody wants to comment on this? Do you feel your real social life profits from this, or does it get in the way of it?

tl;dr

These are some things I could think of, do you have some other examples of hypes you aren’t sure about?
What do you usually do in these situations? Are you an early adopter or not so much?