What’s the defining value driving the ‘web 2.0.’ where, to quote Jeremy Zawodny, ‘vendors think of themselves as not just service providers or hardware vendors’ but as platforms for developers? Jon Udell put it well in a post about the new event databases that are popping up. He thinks there’s room for many different services:

If you want a seat at the table you just need to have good table manners, and that really comes down to one simple rule: don’t lock in my data. Services that try to do that will fail because, in the final analysis, social applications are powered by the people who co-create them. We’ll use online services to help us create and organize our information, but we’ll use them opportunistically. Services won’t own our information. We’ll migrate it freely to wherever it works best for us.

We could call this the dinner table perspective: we’re all contributors, and the point is to have an enjoyable conversation together. The idea of value as necessitating a process of co-creation—not merely viewing it as an inconsequential if welcome sideshow—is quite distinct in comparison to the one in Joachim Buschken’s recent book Higher Profits Through Customer Lock-In. According to the book summary:

For the most part, Customer Satisfaction programs are ineffective. Companies need to strive for Customer Lock-in. Customers are locked into a company’s product when the switching costs are high. This could result from the product being integrated into the companies’ business systems. Thus, managers must ask themselves, ‘How can I increase the switching costs of my customer?’

This could be called the prison perspective: customers are inmates, and the point is to keep them from escaping. If they are happy in their cells that’s cool but in the end, it’s the efficiency of the locks that determines the profits of the business. It’s interesting to think about the practices and arrangements that continue to reproduce both rationalities in their own worlds… and how one might subvert them ;)

Implanted RFIDs are a pretty startling way to discriminate the out crowd from the in crowd, both with non-humans and humans. Japan’s planning to implant foreign dogs with RFID, while a Spanish club owner offers implants to his VIP customers (via Joi Ito). I know this is an obvious thing to say, but this is not a simple good-vs-evil issue: the world of RFIDs is not black and the world without them is not white. We need knowledgeable non-fundamentalist discussion about the politics of electronic tagging, pressingly.

Today at her seminar Lucy quoted Brian Bloomfield on the boundaries that the use of a technological system can create for thought. The system in question is in the UK National Health Service, but the point is very relevant to social software (such as weblogs and wikis):

Once we had embarked upon the journey afforded us by the system, only a certain terrain was open to inspection; we could debate the the features of that terrain as made visible through the menus, records, and displays of the information system, but we could not switch the machine off and debate alternative landscapes; we could zoom in on details down to the level of records pertaining to individual treatment regimes for a given patient, or pull back and purview the architecture of the database as a whole, but we could not escape the boundaries implicitly defined by using the system.

See (Bloomfield 1991, p. 717).

Venture capitalists are hurting and having worked for one, personally I don’t feel particular sympathy toward the industry as long as it disregards the idea of “use value” and continues to operate on pure greed. When I say greediness is bad I don’t mean you should give up your allowance or start acting like David in Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good. What I mean is that a focus purely on the market value (exchange value) of the firm and a disregard for the effects of its products on people’s quality of life is practically and morally unsustainable. Recently some venture capitalists have started to look into debt financing instead of equity financing. Writes Mike on Techdirt: having debt makes you much more focused on succeeding, since you have the pressure to make the interest payments. It really helps to focus and motivate you. For a while now I’d been wondering why companies always look to raise venture capital instead of taking on loans. The obvious answer is that a capital investment doesn’t need to be paid back like a loan. Exchange-value focus seems built into the very structure of equity financing. I wonder if other forms of financing might direct the focus towards a more balanced approach? Here’s a Red Herring article on the VC turn to debt financing.