March 05, 2006

Incentives to decentralization

Edgieo is a conceptually nifty decentralized listing service -- like craigslist, but it aggregates listings you put on your blog. The bit this misses is how and why an individual would put a listing on his/her own blog rather than craigs list or ebay, when those services already have a large audience and easy listing tools.

In order to get adopted, a standard needs to be:

  • supported by an existing community
  • supported by a widely used tool, or
  • of benefit to the user him/herself, or
  • a mix of these. As far as I can tell, edgeio doesn't have any of these, just a sprinkle of decentralization magic pixie dust.

    Posted by alevin at March 5, 2006 08:20 PM | TrackBack
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Comments

I suspect you're over-thinking this. The greatest of these is #3 - benefit to the user him/herself, or in this case more benefit than an existing de facto standard like Craigslist. As I wrote at http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/02/talk-to-my-machine.html (about coComment), the great thing about social software - when it works - is that it benefits the first user even if [s]he's the only user. This kind of payback is a prerequisite to options #1 and #2 rather than an alternative, shirley - that's how the user communities accrete & the widgets get added to widely-used tools. (I'm not saying that's how the tools get to be widely-used - I'm not that much of a market populist*.)

*http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/04/market_populism_in_the_folksonomies_debate.html

(Wish these comments supported HTML!)

Posted by: Phil on March 6, 2006 05:49 AM
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