👋 On-time for your weekend: a round-up of this week's most remarkable stories at the intersection of #ecosystem #innovation and #platform #organisation.
Web of Relations
There are other things to explore here, like the value of reputation and relationships. If objects (or businesses, products, funds, etc…) are not valuable independent of a network, and if that’s becoming increasingly true as everything, including our attention and tastes, are becoming more fragmented, then it would seem that maintaining a good reputation in one’s subset of the network is more valuable than ever. Cutting yourself off from the web of relations is death. That’s a good check and balance in a system with fewer centralized gatekeepers.
👀This is a somewhat philosophical story, but hey, how we perceive the world changes with every paradigm shift. It's not a coincidence that we move away from the linear perception that has been dominating since the beginning of the scientific revolution - Not Boring.
The internet turned “money” into a hobby
They seemed to work in tech or finance, mostly, and had come to connect with others over the thing they loved most in the world, the wild force driving the feeding frenzy of people storming the bouncer to get inside: money, and making it as quickly as possible. The event’s attendees were at the extreme end, of course, but their language has started trickling into the mainstream as well. If Instagram made everyone a photographer and Twitter made everyone a writer, perhaps whatever the internet has done to the traditional banking system is in the process of turning us all into finance bros.
🧡A hobby may not be far away from passion, but being cautious of what we put our heart into may be quite important especially when the world doesn't know yet where this is going - by Rebecca Jennings
The Wrath of Razzlekhan
Most of what came before are big platforms run by big, powerful, data hungry companies — social platforms, search platforms, shopping platforms, financial platforms. What we are witnessing is a generational line being drawn between the Crypto Economy and the Platform Economy. It’s energy source runs deeper than dissatisfaction with a technical architecture or legacy financial systems. Nextgen angst lives in a world where buying a home feels unattainable, where doing better than your parent’s generation seems unlikely, where political common ground is a Marvel movie. Covid feels like an epilogue to a story about a deeply dysfunctional system. Why not ignore it all and get rich quick?
🕵️♀️And a lot more on NFTs and Crypto in the platform context, and where this may be going - by Troy Young
🎧How Famous Birthdays built a data business off celebrity searches
The user experience on mobile for Wikipedia was not good. You don’t want to book report on mobile. You want to get right to it... One thing I have always stuck to was that internal search is the north star. You can look at analytics all day long, but what people are searching all in your property is gold, because it’s what they want. And a lot of websites you will notice use google products where it shows results from your site. So if I search basketball, it would show any result on Famous Birthdays for basketball. But instead on mobile you don’t want to have an extra extra clicks, we took the user right to the page they want. So if they search for Tom Hanks they went right to his profile... By building out our own search we’ll also have technology where we can see, what was being missed.
TikTok is where mobile consumption is, and at the same time you have iPhones getting more powerful, 5G is getting more powerful, and then the creators, users have found that that’s a great way of being entertained. TikTok and the AI algorithms make it so easy... We are not going backwards to a two hours movie from a 15 seconds TikTok. And I also think, the social platforms as you know have been burned by news. They wouldn’t stay away from there. Creators have much more evergreen for that. The social platforms, for years they wouldn’t prioritise creators. That completely flipped... Even the traditional stars, JLO, Will Smith are going on TikTok. It’s not only that the new people don’t aspire to be traditional stars, but the traditional sees the leverage of the creators. The creator economy is not a fad.
This is the story of Famous Birthday’s origins, tune in to listen in how it became the IMDB of the Creator Economy, and much much more on the creator economy and building out a true learning organisation - by Brian Morrissey from The Rebooting
If you like this digest, you might appreciate the sister newsletter at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture as well. This week's edition is all about Better
Please, feel free to send tips, comments, and ideas for the next digest by replying to this post. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏