![]() ![]() This is the gray market, with wild discrepancies in quality, price and reliability, not to mention, its invariable kickbacks, corruption and rip-offs. It's not so hard to argue that the inefficiency of mankind's single largest economic activity, the one-to-one market, has been a major drag on human progress. Of course, romance, fleeting or otherwise, is more and more a digital function. Kickstarter, more amazingly, puts entrepreneurs and oddballs together with people who, for strange and wonderful reasons, want to give them money to pursue their efforts. puts doctors and patients together, streamlining and demystifying that once mystical (read: not transparent) and bureaucratic relationship. But instead of being in undifferentiated list form, it's a site organized around actually helping you remodel, with the services of architects, designers and contractors, as on display and available as sinks, sofas and clever design elements. is about how to meet a decorator or contractor to remodel your home. The place-an-ad classified approach or the time-consuming word-of-mouth recommendation is now formalized into who and where and what instrument and what level of expertise and what time slot and, of course, peer recommendations - and make an appointment now. organizes one of the most disordered grab-bag aspects of the education market: how to get your kid music lessons. I connect through my phone to a worldwide network of freelance translators, and use the phone as the real-time translator instrument. ![]() This is a specific mobile development: I most need a translator on the spot, in a hospital, in a cab, in any moment of sudden language confusion. ![]() ![]() , for instance, harnesses people with second-language skills - a widespread and underutilized talent - and connects them with people who, at a precise moment, are in desperate need of that skill. These new social-market platforms go further, creating marketplaces for a growing variety of isolated pieces of expertise in oversupply. Likewise, Uber, taking advantage of smartphone immediacy, is monetizing the dead time of limousine drivers.Īrguably, these are the real models of social business, not Facebook. They include enterprises such as Airbnb, which is essentially a listing service for those who want to rent out their home or apartment for a brief time, and Uber, an at-your-beck-and-call limo service that you hail with a smartphone.Īirbnb not only creates a one-to-one exchange, but turns dead space - the empty rooms in your life - into trade-able commodities. In one of those seemingly overnight digital upsets, this you-want/I-have paradigm, this far-flung pairing up, is being re-imagined by market makers and market rationalists known as service exchanges. In effect, it just mimicked the thing it replaced, as when movies were merely films of stage shows. The extraordinary thing is that such a primitive product - a list on the Web - has lasted so long. Craigslist took oddball synchronicity inter-national.īut now this is called social media - and Craig Newmark's listing service seems only slightly less dumb and one-dimensional than the classifieds it replaced. Before Craigslist, that pretty much defined the most lucrative classified pages of the Village Voice. It was once the marvel (and prurience) of Craigslist, the weird collection of random people whose random interests and abilities might intersect with your random needs. It may not be a helpful revenge for newspaper people that Craigslist is now becoming the detritus of the current digital revolution, but it is no doubt a sweet one. They are no more prepared to be usurped than were the organizations whose lunch they consumed.įor newspapers, the single most painful disruptor has been Craigslist, which, by virtue of cost and reach, has in the past 10 years seized the classified listings business from which most newspapers derived not just the major part of their profits but much of their social connection. One of the great plot twists and delicious ironies of the digital age is watching the disrupters get disrupted. ![]()
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