The problem of matching social attention and products...

Many people have already stolen the attention-scarcity ideas from Herb Simon and said that the most important problem in our information overloaded society is the efficient distribution of attention. What some have called the "attention economy" is nothing more than a re-packaging of this idea.

In business, of course, getting the consumers' attention is quickly becoming an important aspect of being successful. Traditional ways of getting people's attention is through advertisement, and we have witnessed a dramatic transformation of how advertisements work in the online world in the last decade, from display advertising to search advertising and, more recently, further to action advertising. Increasingly, we can tie advertising dollars to direct consumer action.

For us, it was not a stretch, then, to start thinking about how the consumer actions are starting to quickly feedback to product design. Thus, we now have people talking about crowdsourced product designs. The most agile companies now listen to the consumers via channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blog analytics. They do this via services such as brand management consultants and sentiment analysis tools, so much so, they are able to discern tiny changes in consumer awareness of product issues and their desires.

We know also that traditional economic models serves to optimize the distribution of products to people who want them. But these models have also recently been used to optimize the distribution of people's attention to products that might serve their needs. The two usages obviously goes hand-in-hand.

If we can help companies to serve people attention spots just-in-time with the best products, we would have a highly optimized economy that wastes little energy in distributing worthless advertisements (or spam). In fact, the existence of spam points to the inefficiencies in the economic system.

Turns out that versions of this problem exists everywhere in the Web2.0 world:

• The problem of efficiently distributing the best tweets to the people who want to view them is a version of this attention distribution problem. Any time you see a tweet that was worthless to you is an opportunity for optimization.
  
• The problem of pointing experts to the most valuable articles that they can contribute to in Wikipedia is another version.
  

Solutions to these problems might take the form of recommendation systems or filtering systems, but might also be efficient interactive browsing systems (for products in an online store like Amazon, or articles in Wikipedia). Some thought experiments:

• What if we can design an expertise finding system that recommends the best articles for you to contribute to in Wikipedia? Would it increase participation rates?
  
• What if we analyze your social network everyday and tell you the best tweets that you should spend five minutes on? Would more people retweet more often?
  
• What if product designers are better tuned to trending topics and needs, would they enable companies to succeed more often? Are companies like Zazzle and Cafepress the prototype examples of lubricating this path?
  

Your thoughts?

Kiva.org to speak at PARC's Web2.0 Speaker Series

Premal Shah, the President of Kiva.org, is speaking at PARC tomorrow, and I'm really excited. Kiva.org is a non-profit organization that provides microloans to individuals in the developing world. Over the last few months, as reported by the NYTimes Magazine, Kiva.org has had so much demand, that some visitors to the website was greeted with the message, "Thanks Kiva Lenders! You've funded EVERY business on the site!!". When was the last time you heard from a charity that it had enough money to do everything it wanted to do? That's the amazing popularity of Kiva.

After seeing a PBS Frontline special late at night in my hotel room while I was traveling out of town in Nov 2006, I immediately opened my web browser and joined other people in discovering the joy of being a microlender. The experience has been amazing. I've made 8 loans so far and tell everyone about Kiva whenever I can.



What's amazing about Kiva is that it uses Web2.0 application design principles to connect lenders to borrowers.

First, it builds a social network around a microloan, so you can see everyone who has also loaned to the same person. While I personally have not really experienced a lot of communication between lenders so far due to my busy schedule, the feel of the community is real. People build their lender profile pages, and some even appears to compete to see who can make more loans.

Second, it exploits the long tail of participation to reach people at all economic levels as potential lenders. If you are willing to part with $25 for a while, you can be a microlender too, and the risk is just a 0.14% default rate! It's hard to convince someone to part with large amounts of money, but it isn't hard to convince almost anyone to loan out $25 that have a good chance of being paid back (and you get to help someone in the mean time!) The concepts of microloans is pioneered by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Third, it builds and thrives on end-user participation. On the fansite, KivaFriends.org, user-generated content show screencasts of how to make a loan step-by-step, people post about their experiences, and organize fundraisers and sell calendars.

I'm really looking forward to the talk tomorrow, and will post the video of the talk here as soon as I can.