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Again, I want to thank you all for the wonderful collaboration and active participation in the last ten weeks! It was a great experience interacting with all of you during the course! Your involvement and performance were excellent! Here are some pictures I took during the last lecture. Good memories…

 

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Hi, 

We were all talking about web 2.0 and stuff like that. That raised the question about what comes after web 2.0. So I started so search about web 3.0. 

First short about Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is not technology more advanced then web 1.0, but the way web builders build their websites and users uses the websites. Web 2.0 also allow users to interact and collaborate with each other, with social media. Examples of Web 2.0 are social networking sites, like twitter and Facebook, but also blogs, video sharing sites etc. 

Web 3.0

The definition of web 3.0 vary greatly. One belief is that the most important features are the semantic web (provides a common framework that allows date to be shared and reused across application). With semantic web their also comes personalization. With this last personalization, technology is being used to accommodate the differences between individuals. The internet will be more focused on the user and will show what the user wants it to show. Conrad Wolfram argued that Web 3.0 is where the computer is generating new information, rather than humans. 

And there are more: John Smart defines web 3.0 as the first-generation Metaverse, this is were the virtual and physical world will be mixed), that include 3D-simulations and things like the SIMS look-a-likes. 

The all agree: Web 3.0 will allow the user to sit back and let the internet do all of the work for them. 

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A very interesting and new subject of conversation these days are prediction markets. This new way of predicting the future has shown great potential. In contrast to old prediction systems, which rely on expert’s opinion, this system listens to the crowd. It’s a very promising concept, but nonetheless there are people that have concerns about it.

Those concerns can, for the most part, be narrowed down to two major points. The first one is that they don’t see how a bunch of random persons can predict events better than experts can. The other concern they have is about the reward system of prediction markets. There are prediction markets where you can use actual money to bet, and you can make a profit or a loss this way. There are also prediction markets that operate on game currency. This way you can’t loose any real money but you only play for recognition or for fun. Now there are people who believe that only prediction markets that award real money can offer accurate predictions. If you use online currency you don’t have the right motivation to make accurate predictions.

To illustrate this I’ve chosen two existing prediction markets. The first one is a dutch website called Optieclub. They focus on predicting the most popular stock exchanges, but also the value of gold and silver. The most popular one on Optieclub is the AEX, the stock exchange located in Amsterdam. They have a system that’s called a binary option. This is a system where you can predict if the value of the stock exchange of your choosing will be higher or lower at the hour than what it is right now. If it’s higher you place a call option, if you think it’ll be lower you place a put option. You can see what other users have done in the last hour, what percentage has placed a put option and what percentage has placed a call option. I found that following the advice of other users, so if most of them placed a call option that I’d also place a call option, could actually be profitable. More often were they right than that they were wrong. So hypothetically you could make a profit with this system.  In reality it isn’t really reliable, unless you place an option every hour of the day all days of the week.

My second example is PredictWallStreet.com, which is pretty similar to Optieclub. It lets people predict all kinds of companies in the stock exchange and they show the results of the predictions. You can see historical prices and predictions and you can make a prediction for a day, a week, a month and even for a year. The last one is already a bit different from Optieclub, but still basically the same thing. They do differ a lot on one thing though, and that is the reward system.

Where Optieclub is really designed for people to make or lose money on trading stocks, PredictWallStreet is not. Here you can’t put money on your predictions. What you do get though, is points if your prediction is right. The people with the best scores then show up on the top ten predictors list which is placed on the homepage for everyone to see. There are also small contest for players to participate in where they can win money for right predictions. This is a completely different motivator than Optieclub has. Interestingly enough though the predictions don’t seem to be incredibly accurate. Prices and predictions are not really the same line when put into a graph and accuracy is only around 50%-60% most of the time. This might have to do with the amount of predictors. When I tried some predictions I noticed that mostly around 40 people had voted before me already, which doesn’t seem like a lot. It is most definitely an interesting tool to use for stock traders though.

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Hello everyone

My first article was Co-Creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective by Vladimir Zwass, throughout the article he examines co-creation inside out. He first starts why current marketing environment is not like as it used to be. He points out that distinction between customers and producers are no longer clear. He divides co-creation into two, sponsored and autonomous co-creation. He defines and separates every aspects of co-creation and classifies them. One of the interesting phenomenon he explained was social capital. Social capital is basically the trust level within the virtual communities and how tightly connected the community is. He believes that higher level of social capital also increases co-creation activities. Most of the things explained in the article is things we already know but what makes this article important that it creates an in debt framework for co-creation. The taxonomy he created helps to analyze the co-creation projects, and provides you the outline.

Second article was Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on eWOM versus Observational Learning by Yubo Chen, Qi Wang, and Jinhong Xie. The article explains the result of the experiment that tests effects of WOM and Observational Learning (OL). I’m just gonna move directly to their results. They wanted to figure out whether OL and WOM individually have effects on sales, whether change in WOM affects OL or other way around, also for each interaction method they wanted to find out negative or positive of them have greater effect on the sales. They used Amazon.com’s data for their experiment. They found out that negative WOM has greater effect on sales than positive. However they also see that negative OL usually does not affect customer decision, at least not as much as positive OL. Their explanation for this was that, according to Cascade theory if there is no much information available we make our own decisions, but if all the people are buying one product, we feel inclined to buy that product as well. However if one product is not popular, sometimes it may not be the reason that the product is bad but it appeals to a niche market or its an advance product. They also see that OL and WOM contribute to each other, if you have both tools on your e-commerce site they will work better than having just one of them available.

My third article was “Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy” by Barbara Giamanco and Kent Gredoire. The review tries to persuade why social media is important for businesses. They advice the managers not to be scared from social media but find ways to use it for their own benefit. One of the very catchy story they used was, people ask a robber why he robs banks, and he replies “its where the money is”.  They say since most of the customers spend most of their time in sites like twitter and Facebook  it is wise for companies to be there too. They also advice managers to encourage their employees to use social media not only marketers or sales people but everyone.

I am posting this table mainly because I believe it might come handy for if your trying to examine a company and you need a framework its good summary to provide decent outline.

Taxonomic Framework  of Factors in Co-Creation
Performers	The world	Anyone regardless of location and knowledge can contribute
	Prequalified Individuals	To be able to contribute, the contributor should meet the criteria.
	Community Members	In some closely bonded communities contributions will be higher
	Skilled Contributors	In OSS projects, contributors should be skilled in software program writing
Motivation	Extrinsic	External rewards, and rewards provided by others
	Intrinsic	Inner motivations of individuals, such as satisfying self-affiliation needs.
Governance	Individual Autonomy	Uncoordinated correlation
	Collective Norms	Collective expectations of the communities regarding their behavior to each other or to co-creation
	Software Code	In OSS, the rules to write the program also shape the creation and the re-use of the software.
	Facilitators	Found useful in opinion aggregators
	Adhocracy	Can be seen some successful OSS projects
	Bureaucracy	early  Wikipedia evolved from this kind of governance
	Market mechanism	Information markets, (stock market exchange rules)
	Hybrid Forms	Includes mixed governance models, such as Wikipedia
Task Characteristics	Structural complexity	The degree of complexity of structure of co-creation projects. High in OSS, really low in blogging.
	Intellective Demands	What the project want from the contributors? Knowledge, skills, experience, creativity or diversity.
	Effort Intensity	How much time should the contributors (individuals)  spent for the project being successful?
	Time Frame	How long it takes to successfully complete a project? For Wikipedia case infinitely many
Principal Mode of Product Aggregation	Searchable Corpus	Affective search engine to aggregate and classify the content, example; Technorati
	Hyperlinking	Generally combined with other methods, a native web method to aggregate.
	Progressive Refinement	Wikipedia, software coding
	Statistical Rankings and Ratings	Can be used to summarize or convey sentiment
	Competitions and Voting	Putting content in competition and by users vote deciding which project to invest
	Information Markets	Select an idea or options from all possible options or ideas.
	Bottom-up Taxonomy(folksonomy)	Classify and provide access like Flickr
	Moderators, auditors, and facilitators	For example Slashdot, they help selecting the business models
Economic Beneficiary	The World	Everyone is benefited from the project, such as Wikipedia
	The Community	Benefits usually with the sponsoring company
	The Sponsoring Firm	Sponsoring co-creation firm
	The Aggregator	Such as Apple App World with the contributors
	The Contributors	InnoCentive,  Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

My examples were MMORPG game called Tibia and Apple app World.

this table was my comparison of these two companies.

Comparison criteria of co-creation	Apple App World	Tibia –MMORPG (CIP)
Autonomous or Sponsored?	Sponsored	Both, some value creation activities for the VC not supported by the company
Performers	Skilled Contributors	The World
Motivation	Mostly extrinsic	Mostly intrinsic
Governance	Software Code	Hybrid Forms both Collective Norms, Software Code and Bureaucracy
Structural complexity	Relatively high	Low, and in some cases high –such highly complex contests
Intellective Demands	creativity and diversity	Knowledge, skills, experience, creativity, and  diversity –depending on the project
Effort Intensity	High	Vide ranged –depending on the contest or contribution
Time Frame	Varies from application to application	Varies from contest to contest but usually less than 1 month
Economic Beneficiary	Both sponsor and contributor	only CIP

Sources

Zwass, V. 2010. Co-Creation: Toward a Taxonomy and an Integrated Research Perspective. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 15(1) 11-48.

Chen, Y., Wang, Q., and Xie, J. 2011. Online Social Interactions: A Natural Experiment on eWOM versus Observational Learning. Journal of Marketing Research 48(2) 238-254.

Giamanco, B., and Gregoire, K. 2012. Tweet me, friend me, make me buy, Harvard Business Review 90(7/8) 88-93.

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Hello fellow students,

Recently Brazilian newspapers span together to Block Google’s news service, Google News.
Google News collects news from all websites and then puts an link on its own “Google News” site. If you want to read the article you will get directed to the site where the article was originally made so they do not have their own reporters searching for the next big thing.
Many news stations approve this way of linking through Google because it increases the traffic on their sites, but the Brazilian journalistic industry does not see the advantages.
The Brazilian stations say that “Google should not benefi commercially from the content it uses and is not prepared to discuss a model of remuneration for this material”. Google replied that they should not have to pay for a service that other parties benefit from.

I think that the Brazilian newspapers should be happy with the increased traffic they get through Google, certainly in this time where a lot of news stations have difficulty to keep their readers through traditional media because everybody reads online. It is true that Google benefits commercially because they provide an extra free service through which they can make profits with advertising. This could be seen as “wrong” but it’s a business model that they have always used.

For now it’s only the Brazilian news stations who blocked Google News with this argument and I wonder which country will follow next.

Do you guys think it’s fair what Google is doing? Or should the Brazilian stations stop with their boycott and be glad that they have more reader?

Jad

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Since a lot of people use Facebook now, more information is becoming public. This makes it easier for stalkers to track their preys and get information about them. Cyberstalkers mostly do this by creating fake accounts to monitor friends, colleagues and even family members (according to http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/). If you think of stalkers, the first thing that comes to mind are dark and creepy persons that secretly watch girls or boys they like. Ex-relationships may also have a large share in the stalker industry. However, because Facebook is getting more popular by the day, stalking becomes more easy for everyone!

Research shows that Americans use Facebook 2 hours a day. In this time they also spy on friends and family members. Is this stalking? Only if the person doesn’t want the other person watching (so if they are not friends on Facebook). However, due to the fact that you can make dummy Facebook accounts (up to 10 before Facebook blocks your IP address), you can gain access to your  prey which you want to stalk.

According to the Inforgraphic below, 3% of Twitter usage is stalking other people. Youtube only has 1.5%, but Facebook has a whopping 16% of stalker usage. 88% of students that use Facebook admits that they check on ex-relationships, and 74% admits that they look on the Facebook page of the new lover of those exes.

The Infographic below explains it all it a good way!

 

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Dating sites are becoming more and more important in the social lives of single people looking for a spouse. According to Forbes magazine, there has been a booming increase of members of dating sites, even though it’s a time of recession. But according to the article, it’s because of the recession that causes people to prefer a dating site than, let’s say, a night at a bar: joining a dating site is much cheaper, whereas a night in a bar can cost you lots of money that you’ve spent on drinks. And a night in a bar doesn’t guarantee you any result –you may not even meet somebody- but spending time on a dating site at least results in meeting new people. Another advantage is that you can filter your search options to your preferences. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’ll immediately hit the jackpot, but those chances could be lower when visiting a bar. Here you can find the article: http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/06/online-dating-industry-face-markets-cx_je_0105autofacescan01.html

Can we say that dating sites can also be considered as social networking sites? Yes, but it’s another type of category. Where can we find the similarities? First of all, a dating site is a platform where people can meet other people and interact with each other, just like the conventional social networking sites. Also, it’s important how you present yourself on either platform. You want people to see you in a certain way, which could be anything, even as somebody that doesn’t want to bother too much with social networking sites. But there all also differences. Where the ‘normal’ social networking sites don’t really have a purpose but to engage people with each other, a dating site is there for you to find a mate. So technically, after meeting the first person on the site, you could have met your misses or mister right and you don’t have to look any further on the site. That means you don’t have to engage anymore with other people and that isn’t very social. But this rarely happens and people most of the time end up meeting more people. Furthermore, because of its clear purpose, interaction between people is motivated on other grounds than compared to the regular social networking sites. But one thing that should be mentioned, is that regular social networking sites also involve activities of people trying to find a spouse.

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For the first time the browsing share of mobile devices has exceeded 10% of all browsing. At the same time the browsing share of desktops dropped. A year ago, the total worldwide browsing by mobile decices was just 5%. People are getting more and more used to the use of internet by mobile devices but also the devices are getting more and more user friendly.

This sounds like heaven for everyone but the telecom operators are complaining about the extra usage of mobile internet. Their investment was not built for this kind of demand and they claim that their revenues are declining because people tend to use free services like whatsapp and Skype.

Operaters in The Netherlands tried to get more money by accusing Google and Facebook of the declining revenues. The operators wanted to charge these companies and customers money for their services but the Dutch government made this impossible by putting netneutrality into the law.

At the moment, the browsing share of mobile devices is growing exponentially. My point of view is that the operators should think about a new way of making money. But there is also space for new companies like Google and Facebook to come up with a new way of communication and a revenue model to make this a sustainable service.

Sources: http://www.geenstijl.nl/mt/archieven/2012/10/bellen_kost_postbedrijven_3521.html
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2948012/telefoons-en-tablets-goed-10-procent-browserverkeer.html

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Hey,

I talked to my community and the students from the USA didn’t have class because of Hurricane Sandy.
For that reason I decided to find out if Social media could play a Role in helping those in need of help.
And I did find an article. In the article social media is used to provide information on how to act in these dire times.
This article is interesting, because it shows how precious information can be. It might even save a life.

http://blog.hootsuite.com/hurricane-sandy-social-media/