Social Networking and Social Shopping on the Internet hit the US atleast a couple of years ago. The free market economics was famously able to take every technology/trend from the haloed Ivy League campuses to becoming full fledged self sustaining social and economic communities; surviving those tough initial years with the gritty startups.
Social Communities: An article in ToI yesterday captures the current trend on the US campuses. The "Out of sight out of mind" phrase has been replaced by "Out of Facebook out of mind". No one probably cares or thinks about you unless you update your status on Facebook, be it your relationship status – “It's complicated” or the more mundane location status. MySpace creates cults on niche themes and YouTube clogs the Internet bandwidth in many a network. Bands are using MySpace to share their new music with the fans for free to conduct a free market research of the vaiabilities of their up-coming albums. And the owners of MySpace earning their dues from advertising. The golden rule of 'give and take' being applied for any community to survive. Driving the economic cycle to be more appropriate.
Economic Communities: iTunes – which one Universal executive with a foot in the mouth disease, had described as equivalent to stealing, is rivaling the Music Industry today. Amazon acts as the facilitator for shopping. And mighty Google besides making everyone's life a wee bit easier, also enabled millions of SMBs to reach targeted consumers through personalized advertising.
And I am very sure I have not even touched the tip of The Long Tail facilitated by the Internet. After reading Chris Anderson’s book I was wondering if his new age economics of the Internet is applicable in India too. I looked around and ended up saying saying “Its complicated’. It comes back to the much-talked-about digital divide in India. The elite Indians having access to Internet have been able to take advantage of the Flat World enabled by the Internet. For the times are changing and there might be these visionaries already tapping into this market. Even at BarCamp5-Bangalore, held a couple of weeks back, the thing that really caught my fancy was the start-up on social shopping customized or rather localized for the Bangalore market.
India has taken to Social Networking like fish to water. Atleast in my generation if you do not Orkut, if not social, you are definitely not accessible. Then there was this article in ET a couple of days back that talks of Social Networking used by companies for reference checks on blogs & Facebook, hiring on Second Life and referrals through LinkedIn. India has caught on in a big way, with Orkut being the alter ego of any 12-45 years old Indian. However I think hiring through Internet and job communities is just very small part of the huge market potential of these online communities.
The basis of Economics is on scarity of resources. Information asymmetry is one of them. It would not be an overkill to say trading happens on the basis of information asymmetry, more so in India. Steven Levitt in Freaknomics even gives the example of real estate agents doing their business of information asymmetry by playing the middle man between the buyers and sellers. If it were not for the property websites like 99acres.com, magicbricks.com, most buyers and sellers would still have been left high and dry. However the challenge in India is its still suffers from the ails of infrastructure woes and the digital divide. "Its complcated" because it is still not able to include the long tail of all buyers and sellers.
Social Communities: An article in ToI yesterday captures the current trend on the US campuses. The "Out of sight out of mind" phrase has been replaced by "Out of Facebook out of mind". No one probably cares or thinks about you unless you update your status on Facebook, be it your relationship status – “It's complicated” or the more mundane location status. MySpace creates cults on niche themes and YouTube clogs the Internet bandwidth in many a network. Bands are using MySpace to share their new music with the fans for free to conduct a free market research of the vaiabilities of their up-coming albums. And the owners of MySpace earning their dues from advertising. The golden rule of 'give and take' being applied for any community to survive. Driving the economic cycle to be more appropriate.
Economic Communities: iTunes – which one Universal executive with a foot in the mouth disease, had described as equivalent to stealing, is rivaling the Music Industry today. Amazon acts as the facilitator for shopping. And mighty Google besides making everyone's life a wee bit easier, also enabled millions of SMBs to reach targeted consumers through personalized advertising.
And I am very sure I have not even touched the tip of The Long Tail facilitated by the Internet. After reading Chris Anderson’s book I was wondering if his new age economics of the Internet is applicable in India too. I looked around and ended up saying saying “Its complicated’. It comes back to the much-talked-about digital divide in India. The elite Indians having access to Internet have been able to take advantage of the Flat World enabled by the Internet. For the times are changing and there might be these visionaries already tapping into this market. Even at BarCamp5-Bangalore, held a couple of weeks back, the thing that really caught my fancy was the start-up on social shopping customized or rather localized for the Bangalore market.
India has taken to Social Networking like fish to water. Atleast in my generation if you do not Orkut, if not social, you are definitely not accessible. Then there was this article in ET a couple of days back that talks of Social Networking used by companies for reference checks on blogs & Facebook, hiring on Second Life and referrals through LinkedIn. India has caught on in a big way, with Orkut being the alter ego of any 12-45 years old Indian. However I think hiring through Internet and job communities is just very small part of the huge market potential of these online communities.
The basis of Economics is on scarity of resources. Information asymmetry is one of them. It would not be an overkill to say trading happens on the basis of information asymmetry, more so in India. Steven Levitt in Freaknomics even gives the example of real estate agents doing their business of information asymmetry by playing the middle man between the buyers and sellers. If it were not for the property websites like 99acres.com, magicbricks.com, most buyers and sellers would still have been left high and dry. However the challenge in India is its still suffers from the ails of infrastructure woes and the digital divide. "Its complcated" because it is still not able to include the long tail of all buyers and sellers.
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