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Online stock market for web2.0 creations

15.Sep.2007

Meta-Markets is a new form of attributing value to social products. The idea is to create an online stock market for things like Facebook friends and Flickr profile views. You can IPO your products, after confirming your the owner, set the price and wait for others to buy shares, using virtual money called Burak. After that you can buy shares from other products, searching for the best opportunity like on a regular market: buy low, sell high.

I still wasn’t able to IPO any product since the application is invite only. There are 4 product markets already available: Del.icio.us bookmark counts, Facebook friends, Flickr profile views and Feedburner feed subscribers. There are also 2 popular markets to come: Digg story counts and Youtube video views. The creator, Burak Arikan, is focusing on popular services that offer open APIs. The idea is to observe how virtual markets evolute and to describe the value of socially networked creative products using economic rules.

The Meta-Markets currency, the Burak, is also used on MIT’s OpenStudio project. This one is an economy based on digital art and its transactions.

It’s simply a play stock market, a good option to learn a bit about how real economies work. But the products traded have real value and while it may help promoting your content, it will encourage buyers to evaluate where’s the value in each social driven product and trying to comprehend how the online society moves.

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