Meta-Markets: An online stock market experiment
A stock’s detail page in Meta-Markets
Meta-Markets is an experiment on which I have been collaborating with my two close friends, Burak Arıkan and Cenk Dölek. Burak, the ultimate prototyper, single-handedly put the core together with his endless energy and spent by far the most effort on it. Cenk, the perfectionist, has created the interactive graphs for stocks and is tying lots of loose ends together to make things work at their best.
One of our aims with this project is to explore the value of online immaterial labor through leveraging the mechanics of stock markets. We have questions. How can we ascribe value to the creative work that people put in to exist - express themselves and connect to others - in online environments? Can we approach these efforts as products? If these products are one’s intellectual property, can owners offer their products to public for raising capital and to make better products?
Market activity in the last 48 hours
To explain things in a more practical way: In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital.
Currently, we have markets based on product categories such as blogs, photos, etc. And we selected pilot services for these product categories based on the accessibility of their APIs. In the end, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, and Feedburner became our initial set. Obviously, these services are represantative of their respective categories and we are planning to introduce more than one service in each category as long as we have access to their APIs.
4 markets active, more to come
Our experiment is still in its early stages. In tech speak, we are in private alpha. We are dealing with everything from server load to semantics on a daily basis. Our user base, which started with friends and friends-of-friends, is now extending to a variety of curious, ambitious, and tolerant people. Hopefully pretty soon, we will come to a stable enough state when we can open up the membership to all creative souls.
If you would like to keep an eye on what’s happening in Meta-Markets, check out our development journal.
