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User Labor is here!

engin — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:54:14 +0000

Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers around the world. Just the right time to introduce our new project, User Labor, to address the issue of the economic sustainability of social web services.

With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.

User Labor is a product of Meta-Markets. While working on fair-values, we had a hard time extracting consistent usage data from web services, because there are no standards on what information web services offer through their APIs. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about user participation in a unified way across services, which is essential for assigning value to assets in Meta-Markets.

Once we finished working on the first draft, we realized that User Labor should not be limited to Meta-Markets, it can have a much broader application. Ultimately, we are hoping that the metrics in ULML can initiate discussions around rewarding the content providers of social web and creating sustainable participation economies.

Here is a screenshot of how you can see your labor in Meta-Markets. Clicking View User Labor link will provide you with a breakdown of your participation in Meta-Markets terms until today.

You can read more at User Labor website.

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Meta-Markets Presentation at Dorkbot-NYC

arikan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:59:23 +0000

Today I will present Meta-Markets at Dorkbot-NYC. I will talk about the progress in Meta-Markets along with my recent project MYPOCKET, the personal spending prediction software (earlier post).

If you are around NYC, please come by. It is 7pm at Location One in Soho.

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Meta-Markets Mini Re-design

engin — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:05:21 +0000

We have been tuning some aspects of Meta-Markets and the updates are now live! In this mini re-design, we have retouched a variety of things from interface improvements to refinement of core concepts. In summary:

Homepage re-designed for surfacing relevant market activities
Action items for profit/investment pointed out (Profitables and Deals)
Fair value formulas improved
Del.icio.us Market became account-based
Profile pages reorganized to reflect social network

Read on for the more detailed version.

A more personal homepage

The main landing page has been bothering us for a while, since it was a bit too generic and could have been more actionable. So we decided to filter Market Activities to stocks you own, instead of displaying all. This way, it will be easier to relate to the flow of activities relevant to your stocks and there will be less randomness. Also, we added activity icons that make it easier to glance at the activities.

The stats (wealth monitor, top gainers etc.) are gone from homepage, since there was too much emphasis on the them. Granted they were adding game value to Meta-Markets, but based on feedback we got from market players, we realized that they were more of a turn-off than excitement at the homepage.

That said, in case you were a big fan of the old homepage, it will live here for a bit longer, but will phase out eventually.

Profitables and Deals

As part of our efforts to make homepage more actionable, we added two new sections on the homepage: Profitables and Deals.

Profitables are the stocks you can sell for profit, based on the comparison of current market value and the cost basis (what you paid when buying those stocks). Deals surface stocks that are good investments, based on market value to fair value comparison.

Update your fair value!

Call to action: In order for new calculations to take place, you will need to update your stocks’ fair values manually. Please do this in your first convenience, otherwise your stock will display and outdated value!

Fair value is our interpretation of the value of one’s work or labor in a web service. So far, we have been measuring labor through quantity (e.g. number photos in Flickr), but real value is created not just through quantity, but also through social impact of work (e.g. average view/photo). When applied, this way of thinking manifests itself in different ways for different services. Here is how we think of fair value for different services:

Facebook: Number of friends adjusted by the cross-friendships in your network.
Flickr: Average view/photo.
Del.icio.us: Number of bookmarks adjusted by how early you discover relative to other bookmarkers (average rank in each bookmark for the most recent bookmarks).
Feedburner: Number of subscribers adjusted by actual readership (reach).

We intend to create a consistent philosophy for measuring labor in different web services, but the type and amount of information we can pull from these services is limiting our intention. In technical terms, there is little to no consistency in the type of usage information provided by different web service APIs. For example (a naive thought), it might have been interesting to incorporate profile views to a Facebook entity fair value, but there is no such information available in their API. But don’t lose hope, we have plans for that in the near future.

Again, please update your stocks’ fair values as soon as you can. You need to do this manually because some necessary data (e.g. profile views in Flickr) cannot be retrieved from the web service without your authorization.

Del.icio.us Market became account-based

Del.icio.us Market contained individual bookmarks as stocks, which was different from the other markets where stocks were accounts (e.g. a Flickr account instead of a Flickr photo). This was a problem because the life-span of an individual bookmark is too-short to be a market entity. As a result, Del.icio.us bookmarks have been flooding the market with no activity. We addressed this problem through transforming Del.icio.us Market to being account-based, like other markets, emphasizing the account (total labor) instead of the individual bookmark (unit labor). Get ready to IPO your Del.icio.us account!

Now, what will happen with the existing Del.icio.us bookmark stocks? You might still see them floating around throughout this transition (for example this one), because we did not want to break any existing links in the system. Also, there might be valuable conversations in these stock pages that are still relevant. However, these stocks can’t be bought/sold anymore and eventually they will be removed from the markets.

We promised to refund those who owned Del.icio.us stocks. While we were setting this up, we bumped into a problem: refunding shareholders with the true value was going to cause quite an unbalanced landscape, opening a huge gap between the rich and the poor. So, we decided to distribute a controlled amount of cash for all Del.icio.us bookmark stocks, which was 10% of the actual refund for everyone. As arbitrary as it looks, limiting refunds with this percentage helped us maintain stability of the markets. If you have observed a sudden increase in your cash balance, it is because we have refunded the 10% of the value of your Del.icio.us stocks.

Social profile pages

In Meta-Markets, every buy/sell transaction is a social connection because an entity represents a person. To put it more philosophically, people distribute their online beings across web services and these distributed selves get connected to other people through transactions in Meta-Markets. For example, if I have 7 shares of Burak’s Flickr account, I am connected to Burak through 7 units of his Flickr existence. It is interesting here to see how number of stocks is quantifying the weight of my connection to Burak.

Anyway, enough nodes and edges. Philosophy put in practice, the profile pages now display not only owned stocks, but also the issuer of the owned stocks. Your transactions become your social network.

So. What do you think?

We would like to initiate open discussions around these updates, so please post your comments for feedback. We will also be discussing these where relevant in the market/stock pages.

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NASDAQ’s New Index For Internet Companies

arikan — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:20:29 +0000

NASDAQ stock exchange has launched a new internet only index, the NASDAQ Internet Index. The new index (^QNET) will track the performance of internet companies doing work in all ranges including search engines, ISPs, ecommerce companies, web hosting and web design firms. There are 93 companies listed in NASDAQ Internet Index including Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and international companies such as Sohu from China and Shutterfly from India. I published the full list as a Google Doc:

List of Companies in NASDAQ Internet Index http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjau4gArJn35DuOD9LVFlMg

I looked for some general stats about the market itself. NASDAQ has approximately 3,200 companies listed, trades about two-billion shares daily, and handled over 1,000 IPOs in 7 years. We can’t compare at all but just to give some stats here, Meta-Markets currently has 307 entities listed, meaning we handled 307 IPOs in 5 months. Not so bad. Of course the context of Meta-Markets is very different. In NASDAQ people trade shares of companies, in Meta-Markets we trade shares of our socially networked products.

NASDAQ has other indexes for various industries. The NASDAQ Financial Product company oversees the development of new NASDAQ indexes, plus the administration and marketing of NASDAQ indexes. Seeing a dedicated company for creating and managing new indexes is inspiring for us in many levels.

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OpenSocial To Expand Meta-Markets?

arikan — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 20:21:06 +0000

Google’s new open web API initative OpenSocial is currently resonating everywhere on the web. OpenSocial enables developers to create social web applications that can run on any social network platform that has the OpenSocial interface standards. It is released by Google and a wide range of partners including Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, Viadeo, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide. The list is growing, you can read more about Open Social’s business implications elsewhere including O’Reilly Radar, Techcrunch, Techmeme, New York Times, and Marc Andressen’s blog and screencast.

It is confirmed that MySpace and Six Apart are also joining the club. It is not known that if Facebook will join the club or not.

OpenSocial clearly hits the topics we have been exploring in Meta-Markets. On the one hand OpenSocial will enable people’s personal information (profile, friends, and activities) flow on a network of service providers and third party applications. On the ther hand the value of our socially networked creative products will become more ambigious. Our intellectual property that is generated by our labor, through our social relationships, and our living (activities) is not measurable by us but only by the service providers, who charge advertisers based on detailed stats. As these “networks of social networks” grow, complexity rises, and the value we generate becomes just more ambiguous for us.

With Meta-Markets we approach this complexity by providing an actionable space—24/7 live stock market—to experiment with the value systems of the social web. We are looking forward to try the new OpenSocial API when it goes online, and see how we can use it in Meta-Markets.

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Flickr Stats

watz — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:16:23 +0000

There’s nothing like statistics to tell your share holders what a great stock you have. Statr for Flickr lets you track your daily or monthly Flickr views, which you can then publish on any web page using a simble embedding code. Here’s an example showing the stats for my Flickr photos:

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“So, what now?”

engin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:21:03 +0000

This is probably what most Meta-Markets people say after signing up. We are well aware that when you first come to Meta-Markets, there is some learning to do, especially if you are not familiar with how stock markets work. For this reason, we prepared a 5-step tour to make the first encounter smooth. You can look at it here. It lives in the help section in case you want to look at it later.

Take the 5-step tour

We kept this one short and sweet - it helps a lot to know some at the beginning. On the other hand, no sweat. Most of the learning happens as you get your hands dirty.

Please post your comments if you have any feedback on the tour.

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Increased Findability

arikan — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:21:22 +0000

We’ve released two new features today, the features of findability: Search and More Activities. These are the features for those who live in a constant flow of information. Perhaps the screens of the portfolio manager above are default for most of us.

Search

A much needed basic function. Now you can search for both people and stocks. Comments search will be added soon.

More Activities

Now you can track the past 48 hours of all the market activity. Currently, by just looking at the numbers, I can say that there are around 400 activities happen in a day. These include IPOs, transactions, bids, price changes, comments, and fair value updates. Sometimes it is helpful to look at the past to see the rising trends, traders, or crisis in certain stocks.

* The photo above is showing the screens of a stock market portfolio manager. From Bloomberg.

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Two or Three Things I know About Graphs

arikan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:09:35 +0000

Although Meta-Markets is about socially networked things, we are not talking about the overhyped “social graph” here, these are hand-made vintage financial graphs that we’ve released today: the Market Index Graph and the Fair Value Graph.

Market Index

A stock market index is the composite value of its stocks. It represents the performance of a whole market and reflects investor opinion on the state of the economy. In Meta-Markets we have an index for each market. The index shows both the daily average price and the volume of transactions. Besides getting an overall view of each market’s activities, you can also compare say Flickr Photo Views market with Facebook Profile Friends market and decide where to move your money.

The images below are the screenshots of the market indexes. We can tell both the Feedburner feed subscribers and the Facebook Profile Friends markets are on the rise!

Fair Value

In Meta-Markets the fair value of a stock is the value generated in the stock’s domain. For example, the total views of your Flickr photos is the fair value. Fair values constantly grow both by your effort and by other people’s autonomous participation. The fair value graph shows the history of change in the fair value growth. For example, we can see the increasing number of your Facebook friends over time. So your Facebook stock’s share holders can have a more articulate understanding of their investments.

Here is my Flickr stock’s market value and fair value graphs. My market value had first big ups and downs, but now it is getting more stable (you never know!). My fair value rised from 7.39β (July) to 11β (October), not so bad for a cameraphone-updated photo stream.

These Meta-Markets graphs not only show brute force financial information, but also tell a sociological fable, perhaps like the master Jean-Luc Godard’s “Two or Three Things I know About Her” told in 1966.

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European Central Bank Icon

arikan — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:36:39 +0000

When European Central Bank launched an architectural design competition in 2003, they asked architects to design a building complex that symbolizes the European Union and its currency, the Euro.

Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) proposed the design above. In their proposal they say:

“The European Central Bank is a bank without tradition, presiding over a currency with no history. The Euro is the only currency not backed by a state. Like Europe itself, the ECB is modern by default, simply because it is unprecedented in its effort.”

OMA’s icon for European Central Bank was the direct translation of the finance graph to a building form. It seems that this default form has no ideological reference, but it is clearly a perfect reference to the ideology of statistics.

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