I don't think micropayments are going to work in anything like
their present form. I do not want to be pestered about "is it
okay to spend half a cent on X?" or "Subscriptions to Y cost
only $12 a year" kind of stuff. That's too much cognitive
overload.
If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web
agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it,
they might have something I'd use.
But the whole "not pester" thing is at odds with what a lot
of sites want to accomplish. For example, a web agent that
was only authorized to spend five bucks a month would regard
any site containing links that cost more than a penny as
too expensive a place to be - and after it discovered this,
I'd want it to reformat pages returned from search engines
etc to de-emphasize those links and the text about the site.
If the agent thinks it's too expensive, it sure as hell
shouldn't be on the first page of search results - at least
not the first page of search results the agent shows me.
Conversely, if the web agent is not authorized to spend
money, then sites supported by micropayments ought to be cut
completely out of search engine results, and links to them
found elsewhere ought to behave as "dead links" as far as
my browser is concerned.
I never EVER want to have to remember a username and password
for a site supported by micropayments -- again, the cognitive
load is too high for the piffling amounts we're talking about.
My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online
habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a
trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is
being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every
ten seconds on the site.
Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to
figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't
spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're
not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So
if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're
going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site
for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before
somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay
sites for FREE!" utility?
Bear