The Next Economic Paradigm is
arriving and the first entries include Foursquare. Few
people understand the significance of this new class of social media
applications. Foursquare contains many (but not yet all)
of the components of the Innovation Economy that we have been
discussing for several years at Ingenesist.com, Conversationalcurreny.com,
and Relationship-economy.com.
Here is what Foursquare does have:
Geolocation: Sure, social media has been great sport
for chatting with your buddies across the world, but nothing really
happens until the rubber meets the road. people need to be in the same
location in order to “build something” together. We call this The Last
Mile of Social Media
Mayor of Popcorn: As silly as this may sound,
badging it is a highly sophisticated feature that we have called the “ knowledge Inventory“.
In order to build anything, there must be an inventory of parts.
“Knowledge” is not the exception as the crude and archaic resume system
would have people believe.
Knowledge is an asset and it will perform as an asset if it is
characterized in the form of a quantity and a quality. “Mayor of
Popcorn”, believe it or not, is in the correct form.
Vetting Mechanism:
Vendors are an equal part of the social network and will soon
provide their coupons, specials, and other economic incentives on
Foursquare because advertising any other way is dead meat. Vendors
will live in a system that is in their best interest to practice high
integrity rather than low integrity while favoring mom and pop
operations that live in the community. We call this “Social Vetting”
as it lives beyond law and government – let the market be the judge.
Here is what they do not have (yet): Currency
The attraction of foursquare is the promise of fun and fancy crowd
play. The incentive is to be seen as connected, mobile, and plugged-in.
As such, people will be implicitly attracted to you like bees to a
flower. In actuality, this game takes Social Media right to the edge of becoming a new
financial system that can compete with, and challenge, the
almighty dollar. No kidding.
Remember that currency is a social agreement. History shows that
people will trade seashells, tulip bulbs, paper notes, and little copper
disks as a device to store and exchange value. All value is expressed
in terms of human incentives of some kind. Well here we have it. Now
let the entrepreneurs play.
That is a huge, huge, huge matter.
The dollar represents productivity….well, so does Foursquare. What
will entrepreneurs do in this environment? How will entrepreneurs
organize communities around “things-o-do” – or even –
“things-that-must-be done”?
Here is the hint. The idea that innovation is the exclusive domain
of corporations, academia, or government is now as obsolete as Twitter. Innovation is
now related to knowledge as knowledge is related to information.
Anything that increases the rate of change of knowledge in a community
can now be defined as innovation in
Foursquare.
Debt and innovation represent the exact same thing.
Innovation is a promise of future productivity. Debt is also a
promise of future productivity. It is only a matter of time that all
of the activity in this new generation of social media applications will
resolve to, and aggregate around, a new form of currency that will
compete with the dollar itself.
Mark these words.