A few weeks back I reviewed ffffound!, the first of a number of web projects that I’ve been beta-testing this summer. Another application that has made a significant impression on me is Burak Arikan’s Meta-Markets. Meta-Markets is an economic simulation which reconsiders individual units of social media as commodities and creates a forum for their exchange (you can see my portfolio above). Arikan describes Meta-Markets as:

An online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles. In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.

I found out about this project through a post on Architectradure at the beginning of August. I explored the system rather innocently at first, but I’ve really been drawn into the simulation over the last two weeks as engaging with the system forces users to view begin examining the nature of their online activities.

The base unit of currency in Meta-Markets is a Burak (β). This virtual currency is used to represent the “social value” of a bookmark or link. Unlike the Linden Dollars (L$) from Second Life, there is no exchange rate between real world dollars and virtual currency as Meta-Markets is a purely speculative enterprise at the moment. The Burak is not a new currency, it was developed for Arikan’s Openstudio project before being ported into Meta-Markets. Openstudio is also an economic experiment, where participants can create online sketches and auction them off to other users. This has yielded an interconnected network of patronage and turned users into producers and collectors. This sense of collaboration and sharing carries through into Meta-Markets.

Meta-Markets puts a premium on the activity associated with social media, so if you are a del.icio.us virtuoso the sites you were the first to bookmark are potential assets on the Meta-Market. In addition to del.icio.us activity, the system commodifies Facebook friends, FeedBurner RSS subscribers and flickr profile views. YouTube and Digg are slated as the next services to be brought into the meta-mix.

A user can bring their online assets into the Meta-Markets exchange via an IPO, which puts a percentage of shares of the asset on sale via a Dutch auction. This allows you to generate income to reinvest across the market. Familiarity with social media doesn’t necessarily translate into market savvy, but with a little practice you pick up the ebb and flow of the simulation quite quickly. The above image is the info rollout for the Serial Consign feed - you can see that I have 24 shares which I have set to sell a 2.5β a share. Meta-Markets tycoon Marius Watz has 62 shares. which he has priced at 1.7β. Marius’s price is the lowest on the market, so he is the current seller. The system utilizes the prices assigned to each stock by each user, as well as the entity data (in this case, number of subscribers) to determine a fair market value. On the far right you can see that I paid 0.61β per share for the stock. The controls to buy and sell are in the middle-right of the interface.

As a new user, I felt compelled to try to hold on to “my” bookmarks and links, but I quickly realized that while everybody brings certain assets to the table, it is the emergent and distributed ownership that makes this project so interesting. Each of the entities on the market has a comments box, which becomes a space for discussion and speculation about the market on a whole as well as the specific asset. While exploring this project, I can’t help but think about the original dot-com bubble and start to wonder about the signal to noise ratio of my holdings. What assets have an inflated value? Which are sleepers?

A friend of mine scoffed at the notion of ascribing a value to the number of Facebook friends a user has, but this by no means ridiculous. Initial estimates place the real-life value of Facebook friends at about $0.30 (USD). What is refreshing about the thinking behind Meta-Markets is that the work done by the “information brokers” of a diverse range of social media has an exchange value.

This tone of this entire discussion reminds me of Asymptote’s 1999 Virtual Trading Floor project for the NYSE (pictured above). This project spatialized the flows of information of the (real) market and truly spoke to the optimism of first dot-com bubble. I can’t help but wonder if Meta-Markets serves a similar purpose for web 2.0.

You can find more information about the development of Meta-Markets through the project blog. While the simulation is currently beta-testing, those interested in participating can leave their email address to be put on a waiting list for future invites. I’m not sure exactly where Meta-Markets is headed but I’ll certainly enjoy watching this project evolve. You can learn more about Burak Arikan at his personal site.

One last thing worth mentioning: Users who want to capitalize on their del.icio.us activity should snag Marius Watz’s deliciousChecker, a handy application for managing the connection of del.icio.us and Meta-Markets. [blogged by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]