Shanti’s Dispatches

Tom Coates

- works for Yahoo
- rapid prototyping group in London
- MySpace: “eye-bleedingly horrible”
- alphabet & writing, the invention of money

Social Software
- an individual should get value from their contributions
- these contributions should provide value to their peers as well

Two types of social software
Consensus & Polyphony

Consensus: Digg & Wikipedia

Believes Polyphonic works much better:
Flickr, Hollywood Stock Exchange, last.fm

Only motivations in life:
- get laid & please jesus

Community motives
- anticipated reciprocity
- reputation
- sense of efficacy
- identification with a group

Random people edit wikipedia w/o ego boost or $$$

When people contribute to a group effort, they overestimate their total contribution (% wise) to the success of the whole.

Why people contribute to open source:
#1. Learning to code
#2. Gaining reputation
#3. Scratching an itch
#4. Contributing to the commons
#5. Sticking it to M$

Sharing without really knowing it
Sharing for personal use
Sharing with friends
Sharing with interest communities
Self-expression / showing off
Altruism / for the good of the world

Be wary of clumsy incentives like:
- money, points & competition

Types of people who engage in MUDs / MMORPGs
diamonds, spades, hearts, clubs

How to open up social value:
- expose every axis of data you can
- give people a place to represent themselves
- allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another

Be wary of creating a monoculture:
- digg and delicious/popular

Not all your users need to participate to generate social value

Where’s the money?
- attention and advertising
- premium accounts

Rise of aggregate data?
- proprietary data sources own a space
- they license their data initially selectively
- increasingly fluid and commodified services emerge with flat rate-card data provisions

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos