Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Tags, Peer Production, Peopleweb

Fred has a cool post on Pincus's idea of the Peopleweb - that the unit of webbiness will flip from 'pages' to people (or other assets, if you like).

This is fundamentally about the notion of peer production. The economics of surfing people/assets are superior to surfing 'pages' - specialization means greater efficiency (for the vast majority of domains).

What's gonna enable this? Pincus is opening up Tribe profiles - open-access is necessary, but not sufficient. Like I pointed when discussing Zopa, the peer-production/distributed ecs of scale model becomes revolutionary when two components are joined: open-access on the supply side, and equally important, some form of shared search/coordination on the demand side.

So we still need search and coordination mechanisms (ie, sharing). This is where tags are gonna come in - because they transform search from hierarchical to multidimensional, massive efficiency gains can be created by surfing people/assets multidimensionally rather than pages hierarchically. Tags are like playlists - a simple form of sharing that has absolutely massive economic consequences.

I'm sure we'll see other (cooler) mechanisms as well, but for now, tags are how, for my money, peer production models like the Peopleweb will explode. But first, we really need better name for all this stuff!!

-- umair // 2:53 PM // 0 comments

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