Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Peer Production - Social Search

Jeteye is a new entrant - kind of like a del.icio.us 2.0; you share 'jetpaks' of similar multimedia content. The value prop is that you've already added value by organizing the content into the 'pak', dropping future search costs for other users.

Interesting, very cool. My thoughts:

1) The terminology is not that great an idea - it just makes things more confusing.

2) I have to put in some serious effort to make a 'pak' - much more than to bookmark a link. Where's my incentive? In a social bookmarking/del.icio.us style system, the value prop is inverted - bookmarks are beneficial to me, but they have an externality: they're also beneficial to you (especially when aggregated).

How does making 'paks' benefit me more than bookmarking and tagging stuff? Put another way, is heavy decentralization - decentralizing organization and selection (or search and coordination, or bookmarks and tags) more economical than light decentralization (in Jeteye, organzation and selection/search and coordination are more centralized: they're both done by you, when you make the 'pak').

It's this that I'm a lil concerned about, because it can lead to scale diseconomies, where totally decentralized solutions can lead to scale economies: look, this is jargony, so here's an example. Note how many cars 'paks' there are - it's not clear how or why they differ; I don't think a tags-based (read: totally decentralized) solution would have this (relatively inefficient) outcome.

I still think it's a wickedly cool idea, and notably cooler than the social search efforts of bigger players, who I hope are looking at this closely. (Via SiliconBeat).

-- umair // 3:57 PM // 0 comments

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