On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:49:05 -0500, "Robert Naiman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The maker of the motion would accept that as a friendly amendment. > > Relatedly, I'm curious why, given the popularity of the social > networking sites, some group of folks have not come up with an open, > not-for-profit competitor. Such a site could fulfill the same > functions, and redirect the rents now being collected by the > commercial sites to socially beneficial purposes. On a technical level this is not really difficult, there is software already in this space (i.e. noserub). However, nowhere is the "network effect" more pronounced that on a social networking site. The value of the network grows with the size of the network. Growing the size of the network requires growing the size of the site's staff, requires significant hosting resources, and possibly most importantly, significant marketing and promotion. How is a "non-for-profit" competitor to accomplish this without venture capital? And while there might be a niche market within the nonprofit sector that could gain traction, most nonprofits join social networking sites for fundraising and outreach, which means that a niche site would not be nearly as attractive for their activities as myspace or facebook and friends. Long before any rents are collected from a social networking site, rent has to be built by investing in brand-building, etc, and all the sites lose money for ages before they are in a position to capture any rent at all. Venture Capital speculation funds these upfront losses and speculates on the rent down the road. Who will fund the upfront losses for an non profit competitor? This touches on some of the issues I discuss here: http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0 Cheers. -- Dmytri Kleiner editing text files since 1981 http://www.telekommunisten.net _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
