xdiscipline » The user is the content - Thoughts across disciplines by Engin Erdogan

The user is the content

2. November 2007, 20:30 Uhrbusiness, economy, intellectual property, socialengin

Yesterday, a bunch of social network services (Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Hi5, Engage, Ning, etc) agreed upon a new platform called OpenSocial, initiated by Google. With this new platform, developers will create applications that work across services and people will be able to reach out to their friends in other networks through these applications. Basically, this is like Facebook’s functionality enabled across other social network sites. The scale has just got much larger.

My Friends on Facebook
My friends in Facebook, created by Friend Wheel Application

We are witnessing the emergence of a new medium, where the user is the content. It’s no coincidence that social advertising networks upon these platforms are being developed as we speak. From a business perspective, there is a huge potential. The continuity of social interactions through little applications (as we see in Facebook) can be overwhelmingly high in these networks, which is free content for the service. Applications, or ephemeral tools for engagement are developed virtually at no extra cost. The more user activity, the more knowledge for the service, the more basis for targeted advertising.

I think it would be quite fair to say that users work for these services. With advertising or other revenue models, the service can make a lot of money through the immaterial labor of users. The scale is no joke, we are talking about approximately 100 million users (and increasing).

Two questions:

1/ Will the users ever get compensated for the value they bring to the service?
2/ If so, how much would that be and who will determine this value?

Related links:

Also check out Burak Arikan’s provoking points on OpenSocial at his blog.