xdiscipline Thoughts across disciplines by Engin Erdoğan

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 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:

• OpenSocial official site
• TechCrunch announces
• Ning is now live with OpenSocial
• OpenSocial to Expand Meta-Markets?

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

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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.

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