Since I already wrote a bit about wikis in last week’s reading response, I think I will just focus on the platforms aspect of this week’s reading.
Two questions from the wiki prompt I’ll be writing about:
1.) What hinders the development of these platforms?
2.) Describe the tension between business and profit on the one hand, and generosity and volunteerism on the other.
Om Malik, quoted on pages 206-207, says the following
I wondered out loud if this culture of participation was seemingly help[ing] build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark, or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset- time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will we share in their upside? Not likely!
The quote above is one I think summarizes a hindrance that platform development faces, and is one I started to question last week in regards to the “why bother” feeling of the people. (I’m so glad with each week at least one my questions are tackled in the readings!) It really is a “do you see the cup as half full or half empty” deal, with it being do you really want to participate in something bigger than yourself, or do you just want to be stuck in your own little minuscule world worrying about how you aren’t profiting financially. I think instead of taking on the perspective of financial profit, perhaps it’s wiser to look at it as experience and being able to see the results in say 20 years down the road, amazed at the type of world created through your participation.
Malik’s point is valid; I definitely understand his position, therefore I’ll attempt to argue the other. Of course we all want to make financial profit by contributing our time into these businesses, after all time is money. But by contributing to these platforms, in essence one is contributing their time to making the world a better and more efficient place to live in. That should count as a huge pay-off, even if it might not pay the bills. I do think that more of these businesses should offer back some kind of compensation for their contributors; maybe through some kind of contribution points program. It shouldn’t be enough to be the only incentive to contributing, that would defeat the whole purpose of the open source platform, but there definitely should be something.
Some businesses offer up freedom as a way to compensate for your time. (For example on page 209, ebay & flickr) Freedom to use their service and to gain recognition from it, allowing you to profit and allowing the businesses running the service to profit from referrals. Tension between profit and volunteering comes in when the business wants to implement a way to gain from all it’s users. Ebay, although it’s technically free to use to buy things, it’s not free to sell. The fees are quite heavy, however they provide a service that allows you freedom to get rid of items that you would not be able to make profit off of otherwise. (Or you might have a smaller audience.) If the fees were any higher, no one would bother with ebay anymore, and they would all move on over to free sites such as craigslist or kijiji. (I believe ebay has lost a lot of users compared to a few years ago, based on my own experience with buying there) Flickr, free to use, but offers special benefits for subscribers. This allows for a balance of that profit / volunteering tension as no one feels cheated by not being required to subscribe or be forced to pay fees in order to use Flickr. But if, like mentioned in the reading, Yahoo! implemented some kind of commissioning program for the artists using Flickr, that would allow for them to bring in many more users.
As a result of this reading, in general and in a very oversimplfied way, I believe people care for three basic things in life. Freedom, profit/gain of some sort (ie. recognition), and time. For the business that wants one of these three basics, they’ll have to provide the other two to the user.
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