Meta-Markets Mini Re-design
We have been tuning some aspects of Meta-Markets and the updates are now live! In this mini re-design, we have retouched a variety of things from interface improvements to refinement of core concepts. In summary:
- Homepage re-designed for surfacing relevant market activities
- Action items for profit/investment pointed out (Profitables and Deals)
- Fair value formulas improved
- Del.icio.us Market became account-based
- Profile pages reorganized to reflect social network
Read on for the more detailed version.
A more personal homepage
The main landing page has been bothering us for a while, since it was a bit too generic and could have been more actionable. So we decided to filter Market Activities to stocks you own, instead of displaying all. This way, it will be easier to relate to the flow of activities relevant to your stocks and there will be less randomness. Also, we added activity icons that make it easier to glance at the activities.
The stats (wealth monitor, top gainers etc.) are gone from homepage, since there was too much emphasis on the them. Granted they were adding game value to Meta-Markets, but based on feedback we got from market players, we realized that they were more of a turn-off than excitement at the homepage.
That said, in case you were a big fan of the old homepage, it will live here for a bit longer, but will phase out eventually.
Profitables and Deals
As part of our efforts to make homepage more actionable, we added two new sections on the homepage: Profitables and Deals.
Profitables are the stocks you can sell for profit, based on the comparison of current market value and the cost basis (what you paid when buying those stocks). Deals surface stocks that are good investments, based on market value to fair value comparison.
Update your fair value!
Call to action: In order for new calculations to take place, you will need to update your stocks’ fair values manually. Please do this in your first convenience, otherwise your stock will display and outdated value!
Fair value is our interpretation of the value of one’s work or labor in a web service. So far, we have been measuring labor through quantity (e.g. number photos in Flickr), but real value is created not just through quantity, but also through social impact of work (e.g. average view/photo). When applied, this way of thinking manifests itself in different ways for different services. Here is how we think of fair value for different services:
- Facebook: Number of friends adjusted by the cross-friendships in your network.
- Flickr: Average view/photo.
- Del.icio.us: Number of bookmarks adjusted by how early you discover relative to other bookmarkers (average rank in each bookmark for the most recent bookmarks).
- Feedburner: Number of subscribers adjusted by actual readership (reach).
We intend to create a consistent philosophy for measuring labor in different web services, but the type and amount of information we can pull from these services is limiting our intention. In technical terms, there is little to no consistency in the type of usage information provided by different web service APIs. For example (a naive thought), it might have been interesting to incorporate profile views to a Facebook entity fair value, but there is no such information available in their API. But don’t lose hope, we have plans for that in the near future.
Again, please update your stocks’ fair values as soon as you can. You need to do this manually because some necessary data (e.g. profile views in Flickr) cannot be retrieved from the web service without your authorization.
Del.icio.us Market became account-based
Del.icio.us Market contained individual bookmarks as stocks, which was different from the other markets where stocks were accounts (e.g. a Flickr account instead of a Flickr photo). This was a problem because the life-span of an individual bookmark is too-short to be a market entity. As a result, Del.icio.us bookmarks have been flooding the market with no activity. We addressed this problem through transforming Del.icio.us Market to being account-based, like other markets, emphasizing the account (total labor) instead of the individual bookmark (unit labor). Get ready to IPO your Del.icio.us account!
Now, what will happen with the existing Del.icio.us bookmark stocks? You might still see them floating around throughout this transition (for example this one), because we did not want to break any existing links in the system. Also, there might be valuable conversations in these stock pages that are still relevant. However, these stocks can’t be bought/sold anymore and eventually they will be removed from the markets.
We promised to refund those who owned Del.icio.us stocks. While we were setting this up, we bumped into a problem: refunding shareholders with the true value was going to cause quite an unbalanced landscape, opening a huge gap between the rich and the poor. So, we decided to distribute a controlled amount of cash for all Del.icio.us bookmark stocks, which was 10% of the actual refund for everyone. As arbitrary as it looks, limiting refunds with this percentage helped us maintain stability of the markets. If you have observed a sudden increase in your cash balance, it is because we have refunded the 10% of the value of your Del.icio.us stocks.
Social profile pages
In Meta-Markets, every buy/sell transaction is a social connection because an entity represents a person. To put it more philosophically, people distribute their online beings across web services and these distributed selves get connected to other people through transactions in Meta-Markets. For example, if I have 7 shares of Burak’s Flickr account, I am connected to Burak through 7 units of his Flickr existence. It is interesting here to see how number of stocks is quantifying the weight of my connection to Burak.
Anyway, enough nodes and edges. Philosophy put in practice, the profile pages now display not only owned stocks, but also the issuer of the owned stocks. Your transactions become your social network.
So. What do you think?
We would like to initiate open discussions around these updates, so please post your comments for feedback. We will also be discussing these where relevant in the market/stock pages.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
About the stock holdings pane, I just love that kind of stuff, but the only thing my eyes were looking for is the capability to change the order by clicking on Issuer, Stocks, amount, price and cost like in most torrent sites for getting the most seeded ones. And maybe there would be some way to see when this ipo being sold, so that we can see an order from the neweset to oldest shares.
I must say that this refreshening made me come back again after weeks.