New Market

Lots of us tend to feel nervous whenever we make heavy use (i.e. become dependent on) an online Market:

• EBay for goods

• LinkedIn and other Social Networking services

It seems like such structures can be implemented in a distributed/open way now.

But a Market does provide some value, in creating Critical Mass around a particular Data Model, Work-Flow, set of User Stories, etc.

And sometimes when people envision a distributed Market they're just counting on some other existing service, like Google as a Web Crawler. Though perhaps such a service is Loosely Coupled enough to be more easily replaced, reducing Lock-In.

• heh, maybe an online Market could act like the Stock Exchange-s, and provide data in Open Formats, but time-delayed. "This user's Reputation Management rating may have changed in the last 7 days..."

Perhaps this is another Stupid Network variation...