Creating New Economies On The Web
According to Wikipedia:
“An economy is the realized social system of production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of a country or other area. A given economy is the end result of a process that involves its technological evolution, civilization’s history and social organization, as well as its geography, resource endowment, and ecology, among other factors. ”
Economies are often referred to when you talk about Countries, but in fact the web has become an economy of its own, with certain sites providing further sub economies.
Let’s put it to the test and look at EBay. EBay has a system of production (third party applications), exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods. It has technological evolution, social organization (feedback system, discussion boards, EBay etiqutte, cult following) and geography (wordlwide) . Third party developers building applications for EBay users like Esnipe, Paypal, and other marketing tools can be argued as using “code resources” to fuel the economy.
EBay is not selling goods, it makes money from fees and services, (much like a government tax) and puts it back into making improvements for it’s new economy. The environment it has created, the eco system, allows the economy to thrive. EBay must nurture, care and continue to improve the economy, or it goes down.
Other sites like Facebook and MySpace, are growing to become economies as well. Originally started as a social network, the environment being created motivates third party developers to build applications to service users thus promoting commerce.
Craigslist has tapped into the exchange of goods, services and social exchanges between local people.
Amazon.com , Buy.com have also created a system that allows third party sellers to sell on their web sites. They no longer sell just direct.
Second Life, a virtual reality game takes it a step further where it has created a fictitious world where real people play their self developed characters and pay real money for fake land, goods or services created by other virtual people. In fact real life companies create a presence in this system to market their goods outside the real world.
The Internet has allowed businesses to create new economies that are fostered and promoted inside each URL. Jignatus.com hopes to be one of those new economies.
Of course, we still have to live in the “real” economy, the one where we have a physical place to live, but what a powerful place the web has become.
Tags: amazon, craigslist, Ebay, internet, new economy, second life