Tue, Sep 13, 2005
eBay, Skype, and Out-of-band Community Building
#
RossMayfield
makes a
really good point about eBay's
acquisition of Skype: (JSU)
Pierre Omidyar once explained to me that one of the smartest things
he did when starting eBay was to not constrain communication around
his market -- by publishing email addresses. He was suggesting to me
that we open the Socialtext Customer Exchange, but the core insight is
more valuable. Back when I was running a B2B exchange, this was
considered a contrarian move. After all, it let buyers and sellers
circumvent your transaction fees in some cases. But letting go of
control fosters liquidity. Especially when you couldn't possibly
structure communications to fit all transactions. Today I would
venture that most of the communication on eBay's transactions are
out-of-band. Other communities with emergent liquidity such as
Craigslist succeed by enabling even further out-of-band communication. (JSV)
(This doesn't explain the valuation, but I'll leave that to the
analysts to sort out.) (JSW)
This is a core component of BlueOxen's long-term strategy to build a
learning community centered around the field of collaboration.
Lock-in completely defeats the larger purpose of such a community, and
it doesn't work anyway. The hard question is, what does it mean to be
a "member" of such a community? With commerce-centered communities,
the answer is easy: Transactions. For knowledge-centered communities,
the answer is less clear cut. (JSX)
/business |
Posted at 2:18pm
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