Lifestreaming, butterflies, and markets (?)
Thinking about information streaming and aggregators, JP writes:
Subscribe aggregators are subscriber-centric. Publish aggregators are publisher-centric. Both types of aggregators, at least in their current form, are backward-looking.
I cannot help but feel that there is a VRM-related innovation to come. Both publish aggregators as well as subscribe aggregators will start dealing with intent, at which point we have digital butterfly markets. Doc, Sean, what do you think?
(For those of you not familiar with the jargon, VRM stands for “vendor relationship management” with the premise being that the traditional producer to consumer paradigm gets flipped to a consumer to producer paradigm – ie consumers ‘advertise’ their preferences and desires to producers who can choose or not to fulfill them. If you are curious to learn more the ProjectVRM blog is a good jumping off point.)
I don’t know if ‘digital butterfly’ markets is the right name (sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel…) but I imagine what JP is driving at is that with all these rivers of data being published and subscribed to, surely embedded in these flows are the ‘fish’. Real, actionable, intentions ready to be fulfilled. I’m not an expert in artificial intelligence, and the little I know (enough to be dangerous) about natural language processing, pattern recognition and semantic search suggests to me that this is not a trivial engineering project. Furthermore the more obvious (ie tractable) use-cases don’t seem to really merit the effort. On the other hand, intuition suggests that the spaghetti theorem should hold (throw enough spaghetti at the wall and some is bound to stick.) Whether or not “We’re pretty sure something cool, unexpected, useful, etc. will emerge” is enough to justify spending millions mucking about is less obvious – certainly with most traditional sorts of capital and organization; but we’ve got Google and open-source, so maybe traditional capital won’t be needed.
I guess what I’m trying to say, is that I’m pretty sure there is a ‘there’ there. But I don’t know yet what it is. I think of it as (information) signal amplification. The current generation of web tools – call it Web2.0 for lack of a better shorthand – are the first generation of amplifiers. What I mean by signal amplification, is that I am able to consume, process and distribute an order of magnitude more information than say was possible a decade ago. Adjust for cost (ie resources) and I’m certain the difference is even greater. The consequences are however profound – they create a new paradigm. The result is not ‘only’ being able to do the same thing only 10 times more productively, the result is that you can do things that simply weren’t possible previously. The business model for our company would not hold up without this substrate. So the next phase, what I think JP is hinting at, is the next order of magnitude of information signal amplification. And you know that’s got to throw up its own universe of possibilities. That’s the thing about power laws. They are like Cracker Jacks. A prize in every box.
