Have you ever thought about the effort you put into the social web? How much effort do you think you are putting into posting to your blog, building your Facebook network, beefing up your Flickr portfolio, submitting stories to Digg or shooting videos for YouTube? Most people would probably say “many hours”. Because time is the easiest (only?) means we can use to measure our effort on the social web so far.
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.
