Social web as it stands today is both useful for sharing information, media or any content and it is fun. We mostly enjoy being part of it because we see some value in it. The catch with the social web is that it is more useful as you put more effort in it. What would you say if I told you that you may be able to sell and buy such effort sometime in the future?

Immaterial Labor

In the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the value of this effort a lot because of a project called Meta-Markets which is in private alpha. It is a very interesting project because it deals with the value our social labor. Meta-Markets is the brain child of Burak Arikan who describes it as:

“Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles. In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.”

Meta-markets denotes the product of our online labor for creating and sharing in a social web service as “socially networked creative products”. In Meta-Markets, in the quest of retaining our immaterial labor, currently you can offer to the public, via an IPO, shares of your blog’s Feedburner feed, your Facebook profile, your Flickr photos, a del.icio.us link which is first bookmarked by you. In the future, you will also be able to offer YouTube videos and Digg stories. By IPO, you offer a certain percentage of your shares (up to 50%) to the market via a Dutch style auction. This way, you bring online assets to the exchange market and raise capital to invest in shares for other social commodities created and offered by other market players.

The currency in Meta-Markets is a Burak ( ? ). Investors are given a seed fund of 75? at the beginning for immediate investment. This probably reminds everyone the Linden dollars in Second Life but currently there is no real exchange rate from Burak to US Dollar. However, I know that the ultimate goal of the project is to make it possible to convert immaterial labor to real money.

Value of a Socially Networked Product

At the core of the Meta-Markets is measuring the value of a socially networked product. Meta-markets measures this value by quantifying the product’s social impact in its respective network. For example, during an active flow of eventstreaming, many people rush to share media on social web services about an event and bring lots of traffic and views to their respective networks and create a value. Meta-markets aims to measure that value and make it possible for it to change hands in a market environment.

The figure shows my Facebook profile which I opened to public. I had chosen to offer just 10% of my shares to the public. Meta-Markets calculated a fair value for my stock based on the number of my Facebook friends which gives shareholders an idea about the value of this stock. As of this writing, the stock goes for 2.00? a share and someone is selling 61 shares for 2.20? and stock’s market cap is 200? . There is a neat graph which shows the behavior of the stock over time. On the right are the investors who hold shares of this stock. It is also possible to write comments to the stocks. This is especially good as it makes it possible to introduce your stock and explain why people should invest in it. In addition, comments add a social aspect to the system as well. I know that there is a desire to make Meta-Markets a more social place.

Closing Thoughts

As I already noted, in the valuation of stocks, Meta-Markets uses RSS subscribers for feeds, profile views for Flickr streams, number of friends for Facebook, and bookmark count of del.icio.us links. This reminds me of the discussions of metrics like page views used for web statistics. These quantities definitely tell something about the value but are they enough for labor value determination? Immediately after I started playing with Meta-Markets, this was the question I asked myself repeatedly.

As I see it, in Meta-Markets this quantification works as an attention mechanism. A potential investor may look at a new Feedburner feed IPO, see a good number of subscribers and would most probably check the blog to see the quality of the content before making a buy decision. The quality is not in the equation for fair value computation but it is in the mind of the investor and hidden from the market. I think this is a challenge for Meta-Markets. However, in this case, in tackling this challange, Meta-Markets is dependent on APIs of social web services. The solution to this problem depends partly on how much information a social web service is willing to share through the APIs and partly to the ways Meta-Markets will interpret and combine all available data. My guess is that there is going to be a bigger interest on valuation of our social labor and a bigger push for social web services to provide more data through their APIs.

On the surface, it is easy to describe Meta-Markets as an online stock market simulation game. It is definitely an addictive one at that. However, it is also an experiment with real potential. It is obvious that social web services, especially ad supported networks like Facebook rely on our labor in the network. The value of such a company is indeed partly measured by the number of people putting effort in it. Facebook knows this value and most probably has the means to know this value and capitalize on it. However, we poor social web workers can only gain immaterial returns on our investment. As the social web services improve and become even more popular and depend on our labor even more, we will be more willing to know the real value of our immaterial labor. This is what Meta-Markets is trying to figure out.

What makes this tour an experiment is that in addition to this traditional reporting, Hammersley will also be posting news to his blog, pictures to Flickr, videos to YouTube and he will be microblogging on Twitter. Moreover, he will be sharing his bookmarks on del.icio.us and networking on Facebook.

I find this news very interesting and noteworthy not only because this is going to take place in Turkey during the general elections but also because this is a great demonstration of how traditional media can embrace the external tools of the web.

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, says:

This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences.
…
The interesting thing that we?re doing is that the majority of the content that we?re going to be producing online is going to be hosted externally on different external sites. We?re using services which are already very popular. ?By using external tools we?re able to do very interesting things very quickly without resorting to any enormously long development time. It?s about being part of the web, rather than on the web.

I think the above quote coming from a traditional media director is very insightful and very true. This shows that BBC is understanding the value of external tools and really embracing their 15 web principles. As the Press Gazette article points at, this experiment is very much guided by the 5th principle: ?Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don?t restrict your creativity to your own site.?

I will definitely follow Hammersley in his journey and will be following his reports and look forward to socialize with him on Facebook. If you are interested here is how you can follow this social media experiment:

Ben Hammersley’s blog
Ben Hammersley’s Twitter
Ben Hammersley’s Flickr Photo Stream
Ben Hammersley’s del.ico.us bookmarks
Ben Hammersley’s YouTube videos

bbc, social media, ben hammersley, turkey elections

However, this must have not been enough for Viacom since today they announced that they sued YouTube for a total of 1 billion dollars for a “massive intentional copyright infringement”. I think “massive” and “intentional” are the interesting words in this quote.

We will all see how this turns out but my opinion is that YouTube will be able to get out of this. As Fred Wilson says this is very different from the Napster case and it will be interesting how Viacom will accuse YouTube (apart from the obvious way) and how Google/YouTube (GooTube) will defend themselves.

In situations like these, Google usually leaves the announcements to YouTube but this time it is widely reported that they came out with a statement:

We have not received the lawsuit but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree. YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community.

Let’s see how this will turn out. What do you think the outcome will be? Do you see Viacom as the victim of a “massive and intentional copyright infringement”?

Technorati Tags: youtube, viacom, viacom sues youtube, copyright infringement

[tags] youtube, viacom, copyright, law, legislation[/tags]

The report is publicly available here. Beyond the finding that 55% of teens use social networking sites and create profiles, I found it pretty important that 66% of them have private profiles.

From the report, it is also apparent that teens use those sites in every social aspect of their lives. Probably the reason why I do not get much out of those sites is the fact that I am not a teenager anymore.

Anyway, if you would like to read a couple opinions on that I recommend apophenia and Unit Structures.

Technorati Tags: pew, pew report, social networking, social networking sites, myspace, facebook

[tags] social networks, news/opinion[/tags]

Via Google Blogoscoped

UPDATE: Google Blogoscoped has posted an interview with Samy.

myspace, samy