Intention Economy Redux

Jeremy Ballenger raises some interesting questions about x:posted, and more precisely, about the methods and tactics that should be used in raising the Intention Economy barn.

…seems a little like consignment sales, sell-side driven to provide a service to buyers. Intention (going by Doc’s idea) is more like buyers yelling ‘I want to buy X‘ and sellers falling over themselves to get to you. X:posted is a central respository or market for sellers - buyers visit and sample the wares. In other words, you still have to go to them. Similar sites are eLance and Guru.I might have misinterpreted Doc’s original idea, but to me something like x:posted or Shel’s approach is close, but not quite there. A functioning intention economy, and for the moment we are restricted to discussing web-enabled commerce, seems to essentially be a search problem. On reflection, my earlier thoughts on this were a little off in describing buyer searches. I think it might actually work the other way, through seller search, buyer filters and maybe even the intelligent use of something like tags.

think mojo

I think he's right, based on what's presented in this post. I think we've come a long way in terms of the definition of what we're building and the direction in which we're moving towards with Social Roots - definitely the thesis is much deeper.

However, Jeremy goes on to add some more fuel to the mixture.

With the increasing use of tags, blog uptake and developments in search technology, this is an example that may have some legs. Ideally, an independent operation would develop the vendor search technology under open source (GNU), alongside parallel development of a plugin for bloggers providing ‘intention tags’. I’ve got nothing against Google (aside from the whole censorship-in-China-thing), but a benefit of the intention economy should be lower transaction costs.

think mojo

The remainder begins an open consideration of providing more and more value to third parties. I think we've seen this problem many times over. For example, one point he seems to lay out is that independent parties can come along, spider the web, and essentially sell leads against it. That's probably great news - for all the usual players. The incentive to search, parse, and store data on resources that makes you know money is considerable and eventually - no one's indexing people looking for Irish Wool, just home refinance.

As for the disparity in costs for these systems, as noted “The more cash you have, the better search technology you can afford.” the reality is that that’s a two-way street. You’ll also need bath tubs full of cash to index the world to find the valuable intentions.

At the same time, we have another pit to overcome - incentive. This problem correlates nicely to the barriers being faced by the Structured Blogging / Microformats groups. Why exactly do I bother to markup this data? Why do I add work to my workflow? Is there an inventive for me other than being a better citizen? Once that’s proven, there’s more traction in all directions.

We’ve had to spend considerable time as we’ve built Social Roots to understand how to create enough value for the user without having cold, hard cash. It’s very difficult and we don’t know if it will work. Chicken and egg indeed.

I recommed everyone join in on this conversation. There’s quite a lot at stake here.

technorati tags:structured+blogging, microformats, economy, intention+economy, doc+searls, marketplaces, socialroots