Incentives to decentralization

Edgieo is a conceptually nifty decentralized listing service — like craigslist, but it aggregates listings you put on your blog. The bit this misses is how and why an individual would put a listing on his/her own blog rather than craigs list or ebay, when those services already have a large audience and easy listing tools.
In order to get adopted, a standard needs to be:

  • supported by an existing community
  • supported by a widely used tool, or
  • of benefit to the user him/herself, or
  • a mix of these. As far as I can tell, edgeio doesn’t have any of these, just a sprinkle of decentralization magic pixie dust.

One thought on “Incentives to decentralization”

  1. I suspect you’re over-thinking this. The greatest of these is #3 – benefit to the user him/herself, or in this case more benefit than an existing de facto standard like Craigslist. As I wrote at http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/02/talk-to-my-machine.html (about coComment), the great thing about social software – when it works – is that it benefits the first user even if [s]he’s the only user. This kind of payback is a prerequisite to options #1 and #2 rather than an alternative, shirley – that’s how the user communities accrete & the widgets get added to widely-used tools. (I’m not saying that’s how the tools get to be widely-used – I’m not that much of a market populist*.)
    *http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/04/market_populism_in_the_folksonomies_debate.html
    (Wish these comments supported HTML!)

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