The beauty of network effects is that once in place, its very hard to displace. For example, now that you and all of your friends are on facebook, its very hard to get you to switch to an arguably website because of the high costs of switching. It’s a pretty big chicken or the egg style problem. Your network site is useless without users, but users won’t switch until they find utility. Enter the Coercive web!
My first experience with the coercive web is thefunded .com, a website devoted to providing information about America’s VC community to entrepreneurs. Rather than try to convince VC’s to join the site, the site owners pre-populated the website with information scraped off of the public web. This leaves VC’s with a dubious choice, join thefunded.com to correct the dubious information about your firm or just let the incorrect information about your address, phone numbers, or investment policies remain.
The most ambitious of these sites that I have seen is spock.com. Spock aggregates information off of numerous social media websites for practically everyone with an online identity. Anyone can search for information, but you can only control access if you join their site. The coercive web indeed!
1 response so far ↓
1 Greedradio // Jan 27, 2010 at 10:10 am
Thanks, good stuff. How is the VC game these days, there are places to go, but perhaps the future isn’t so bright? Or is it?
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