On Jan 9, 2009, at 8:52 AM, Silicon Shaman wrote: > although the idea of social economy did spark an idea, kinda ... > something I'd noticed on LJ and Secondlife is that people use > social networks to advertise their craft enterprises in a word-of- > mouth sort of way. > > Is there a way we can offer users the opportunity to create 'shops' ? > Sort of a paid account with a user payment system, or an easy > integration to paypal if they have that, and a product search > function [or maybe one could just use tags] ?? > > I know it's not specifically a social network sort of thing, but it > does enhance the user experience by offering crafty type folk an > easy way to buy and sell their stuff [and the way the economy is > going, we're going to be seeing more people doing that]
That's one thing that I doubt we'll ever offer directly, simply because the minute you start doing that you need to have some kind of dispute-resolution mechanism (what happens when someone doesn't pay for shipped goods, what happens when someone doesn't ship the goods people paid for). LJ always had massive problems with LJ-based auctions, where people conducted transactions one-on-one on LJ, it went poorly, and then they expected LJ to arbitrate. That's not the direct focus of the site, and building an infrastructure to support it would waste time and personpower that's best directed elsewhere. You're right, though, in that social media properties (especially those who are, as DW is intended to be, geared at creative people) are a great place for people to go to a). market themselves and b). find other people who are doing cool things. One of the things I *really* do want to do, relatively soon after launch, is a user-to- user marketplace: think your local paper's classified ads section. Artists and artisans (or even community maintainers!) can pay a small fee, something like $2-$5 or so, to run a classified ad of so many characters (or a small graphic ad) in a specially-designated area for a month, and people can go browse that area by classification -- so if you're looking for crafts, or services, or new communities, etc, you can find them. Totally opt-in -- you don't *have* to go looking -- but integrated with the service (so you can, for instance, 'subscribe' to the marketplace and get the day's new announcements rounded up and displaying on your reading list once a day, or just subscribe to specific areas of the marketplace, so you only see new Etsy shops or new books-for-sale or new communities) and a good place for people to go discover cool new things. That's the kind of thing I mean when I say that we're looking at ways of collecting active revenue that will work *with* the social economy and not against it. The idea is that we will always be looking for ways to collect revenue that provide actual added value, and not in a third-party-sponsorship, "companies put their ads on this feature" kind of way. Our goal is to build things that work *with* people's use of the site, and make more people want to pay us small amounts of money over time instead of seeking larger companies or organizations to pay us one-time payments of larger lump sums. Passive/third-party revenue collection disrupts a site's social economy in a way that well-done active revenue collection doesn't. We will always, always, *always* prioritize active revenue over passive. We will never sell your data to third parties. We will never try to profit off your creative work, your presence on the site, or your involvement on the site by trying to sell it, or access to it, to a third party. Not only is it sleazy (which is enough of a reason not to do it), it's unsustainable business practice in the current internet economy. It would be irresponsible of us as business owners and community leaders to privilege our own short-term profit over the sustainability of the site, the service, and the community over time. In this case, bad business ethics make bad business sense. We're in this for the long haul, not to sell to someone for millions of dollars next week. We want to be the mom-and-pop corner store, not the next Walmart. We want to build something that's based on actual realistic forecasts and projections, not the unsustainable, inflated valuation of Internet Bubble 2.0. ...This is clearly a sore spot for me. *g* > and this thread is in danger of drifting, so I'll shut up now! That's why I changed the topic ;) --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
