Eight Key Ideas driving the Attention Economy

As software developers we tend to focus too much on the trees and as a consequence miss out on seeing the big picture. I thought of writing predictions for 2006, just like I had done in the previous year. It then dawned on me, that despite being keenly aware of seismic shifts in the technology landscape, I was at a complete lost as to where technology was going. I think most of my 2005 predictions were right on the mark, and I believe most of the trends identified will continue to hold true for 2006. However, the question remains, what is driving these trends?

There are a few fundamental ideas that are driving the new economy. This is my first attempt to collect many of them together in the hope that I can get better clarity on how it all fits together and who knows, maybe this just may be the seed the sparks the next killer app?

1. The Attention Economy - The web, mobile phones, MP3 players, game consoles, pvrs etc., the list goes on and on and all competing for your attention. In a world rich in information, that wealth implies a is a scarcity of whatever information consumes. Information consumes attention, and in a world where information is a surplus implies a world where attention is in scarcity. When stuff becomes scarce then its tends to become valuable. Valuable enough the simplistic ideas like the Milliondollarhomepage can become quite lucrative.
2. The Long Tail More than a year ago, I predicted that the term "The Long Tail" would be a buzzword spoken in almost every elevator pitch. Unfortunately for many enterpreneurs the Long Tail doesn't exist in all markets. The Long Tail exists in fragmented markets where there are a disproportionate population of disenfranshised customers. Where it's not worth it for many to service the low-end. Google, Amazon and eBay have built succesful business models that have successfully serviced the low-end in a cost effective way. In an attention economy where attention is fragmented, money can continually be made in those little niches of attention.
3. Situated Software - Clay shirky wrote about the characteristics of Situated Software. That is, software for a market of less than a dozen people and used only for a limited period. That is, there is a real demand for this, but its just too small a market for anyone to service. If one could come up with self-service programming, then you could possibly be on the right track. That exactly what ventures like JotSpot, Ning, Squidoo are trying to achieve today.
4. The Architecture of Participation Software is extremely expensive to build. Gone are the days where a single organization can build a self-contained monolithic application that can adequately serve it's user base. There is a need to be able to share the cost of software development (i.e. "Peer Production"). However, to succeed in this, software must be designed with an architecture of participation in mind. That is software must be build to become recombinant and therefore remixable.
5. Social Currency "No better love has a man than to give his life for the common good." Really nice, unfortunately a good slice of the population isn't as idealistic and altruistic as one would wish. So, one not only must make it easy to contribute but one also make it rewarding. For humans, what makes life rewarding is the social context we live in. We are constantly on the hunt for Social Currency. That is, software that can be made an excuse for people to share with one another is extremely valuable. Just ask the founders of flickr.
6. Market of Conversations It is long past the day when computers where valued for its computational abilities. Today, computers are valuable because they connect people. The most economic value of any future service will come from the brokering of successful conversations and relationships. Borkering not only happens in space but also in time. That is there is a huge demand who can effectively locate the existence (or presence) of a party to converse with. The more difficult that search, the more valueable the service. Social sofware is important, however social networks are important in different contexts and can't live in pre-established silos. These contexts are fragmented and therefore the remixability of social networks (i.e. "Portable Reputation") will be ventually be demanded by the market.
7. Background Devices The software we build should not require a lot of our attention, afterall aren't we quited deprived already? Therefore, unlike software developed in the past, the software of the future will likely just blend in the background. Charlie Schick pointed this out in his entry "What are the true qualities of mobility?". That is, software should only consume our attention only when it is completely necessary. Konfabulator is a good example of software that lives in the background. In fact, background software requires rich interactive user interfaces to make their use use painless and utterly convenient.
8. Pervasive Computing - In an earlier entry I discussed "Six Operators of Modularity" which says that Modularity goes beyond remixability. Modularity requires portability, that is, a composition should be applicable in different contexts. The strength of many web applications is that information is portable and therefore accessible in different contexts. Mobile phones take this ubiquity to the next level exponentially exploding the number of contexts in which a computing device may be used. Ubiquitious portalbility implies that your services are available not just on a fixed line environment, but every social context you find yourself in. These "Social Machines" that come in a multitude of form factors and a variety of connectivity options lead to a fragmented market; a market characteristic of the Long Tail.

You might now be asking yourself that you've seen this before in the discussions on Web 2.0. Unfortunately, I've never liked the term in that its all too easy to misuse and abuse. However, the fact that there exists a big discussion on the definition of Web 2.0 indicates that a lot of people recognize and know that there's something there. However, just like the hit T.V. series 'Lost', we individually and collectively don't know where we just are.

The term Web 2.0 because its so vague makes it ineffective for discussion, deriving conclusions or designing solutions. It's that seismic shift that's happening and technology and unfortunately if you can't articulate what drives it then you'll just be as lost as the developers in the trenches.

Physicists understand the world by discovering the fundamental laws that govern the universe and then use these laws to derive the interactions we see in the real world. So when two billiard balls collide and move in different directions, that event is different from almost every occurrence of two billiard balls colliding. However, we recognize the commonality (that is momentum is conserved), and that precisely is what a fundamental law is. That is, something that is present and invariant (non changing) regardless of context.

So it is not going to matter if you've used AJAX or Flash to implement your service. The important point are that the above 'Laws' is present and you understand how it plays in your solution.