xdiscipline Thoughts across disciplines by Engin Erdoğan

Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers around the world. Just the right time to introduce our new project, User Labor, to address the issue of the economic sustainability of social web services. 

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web. 

Web 2.0 services have been assuming the availability of user-generated content in exchange with the utility they offer. For example, in a (needless to say, social) photo sharing service, people upload photos, which create traffic. Traffic creates advertising revenue, which sustains the service. In this cycle, what is supposed to sustain user-generated content is access to the service. However, some user-generated content creates more value for the service than the other. So, how does the service sustain the one that offers higher value, relative to others? In order to answer that question, we need to know how much potential value (i.e. ad revenue) a user generates with how much traffic, through how much content. This is the idea behind User Labor, to determine metrics. 

What next? Potential outcomes are, finer use typologies (instead of just power user), richer service offerings (instead of just free and premium), even a new resume format for users to be used across online services… Also, discussions to emerge around how different users can be rewarded, in what terms.

You can read more at User Labor website. 

Also see Burak, my partner in crime reporting on User Labor in his blog.

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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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