The Next Economic Paradigm is arriving and the first entries include Foursquare. Few people understand the significance of this new class of social media applications. Foursquare contains many (but not yet all) of the components of the Innovation Economy that we have been discussing for several years at Ingenesist.com, Conversationalcurreny.com, and Relationship-economy.com.
Here is what Foursquare does have:
Geolocation: Sure, social media has been great sport for chatting with your buddies across the world, but nothing really happens until the rubber meets the road. people need to be in the same location in order to “build something” together. We call this The Last Mile of Social Media
Mayor of Popcorn: As silly as this may sound, badging it is a highly sophisticated feature that we have called the “knowledge Inventory“. In order to build anything, there must be an inventory of parts. “Knowledge” is not the exception as the crude and archaic resume system would have people believe.
Knowledge is an asset and it will perform as an asset if it is characterized in the form of a quantity and a quality. “Mayor of Popcorn”, believe it or not, is in the correct form.
Vetting Mechanism: Vendors are an equal part of the social network and will soon provide their coupons, specials, and other economic incentives on Foursquare because advertising any other way is dead meat. Vendors will live in a system that is in their best interest to practice high integrity rather than low integrity while favoring mom and pop operations that live in the community. We call this “Social Vetting” as it lives beyond law and government – let the market be the judge.
Here is what they do not have (yet): Currency
The attraction of foursquare is the promise of fun and fancy crowd play. The incentive is to be seen as connected, mobile, and plugged-in. As such, people will be implicitly attracted to you like bees to a flower. In actuality, this game takes Social Media right to the edge of becoming a new financial system that can compete with, and challenge, the almighty dollar. No kidding.
Remember that currency is a social agreement. History shows that people will trade seashells, tulip bulbs, paper notes, and little copper disks as a device to store and exchange value. All value is expressed in terms of human incentives of some kind. Well here we have it. Now let the entrepreneurs play.
That is a huge, huge, huge matter.
The dollar represents productivity….well, so does Foursquare. What will entrepreneurs do in this environment? How will entrepreneurs organize communities around “things-o-do” – or even – “things-that-must-be done”?
Here is the hint. The idea that innovation is the exclusive domain of corporations, academia, or government is now as obsolete as Twitter. Innovation is now related to knowledge as knowledge is related to information. Anything that increases the rate of change of knowledge in a community can now be defined as innovation in Foursquare.
Debt and innovation represent the exact same thing.
Innovation is a promise of future productivity. Debt is also a promise of future productivity. It is only a matter of time that all of the activity in this new generation of social media applications will resolve to, and aggregate around, a new form of currency that will compete with the dollar itself. Mark these words.
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