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The wisdom of crowds – the collective opinion of people about something – is obviously quite valuable, and arguably, often more valuable than the opinion of a single expert, even though admittedly, it is not always the case. If properly harnessed, the wisdom of crowds has the potential of becoming one of the most ubiquitous applications because it applies to anything and to anyone.
An ultimate platform that covers all the different functions of the wisdom of crowds along with a comprehensive set of features that address the needs of all constituents; controlled by the crowd for the crowd with a sophisticated meritocracy system; wrapped up with a very rich user experience; and delivered with great elegance and convenience at any point of interest, from any source, on any device, and in any format; will have a dramatic transformative impact on both the online world as well as the mobile sphere.
Currently, the wisdom of crowds is limited to just products and services. It is also limited to just ratings and reviews, expressed in just text format, manipulated by biased opinions, and accessible at a destination website. Well, that is not exactly a “wisdom”, and is hardly from the “crowd”. For example, you would have to perform some impressive “searching gymnastics” in order to collect the wisdom of the crowds about abortion, recession, dieting, car pooling, global warming, United Nations, Madonna, etc. Assuming that you manage to avoid drowning in all the clutter, you may luckily find an article here or a blog there, but whatever you may find would most probably be limited and tainted, not to mention irrelevant.
After defining the needs of the different constituents including consumers, influencers, marketers, and advertising networks, and describing the limitations of the current solutions, we proposed an ultimate platform capable of changing consumers’ behavior, and making our digital world (both online and mobile) much more connected, convenient, collaborative, and informative. This proposed platform supports:
All functions related to the wisdom of crowds including clueing, defining, annotating, tagging, linking, bookmarking, surfing, and blogging.
All types of opinions, referred to as clues, including ratings, reviews, pros, cons, recommendations to consumers, and suggestions to manufacturers.
All subjects to be clued, from products to politics and everything in between.
All formats including text, rich text, audio, and video.
All devices including toolbars, widgets, websites, and mobile units.
All sources from which clues can be aggregated.
A meritocracy system established by the crowd for the crowd.
A reward system which encourages participation and cements loyalty.
Propagation of clues from somewhere, anywhere, to everywhere. Such instant diffusion of opinions changes consumers’ behavior and transforms the current advertising model from being property-centric to word-centric. Thus, context-driven ads travel alongside clues, and are no longer restricted to be placed at specific properties. Furthermore, the proposed platform offers industrial robustness with high scalability, reliability, fault-tolerance, load balancing, multi-threading, privacy, and security, which are all achieved with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) diverging away from the conventional 3-tier architecture necessary for large distributed systems. The justification of the SOA architecture is the need to offer an open platform which includes an Application Programming Interface (API) based on web services which allow independent developers to integrate their own functions within the platform. Finally, with all such properties, the proposed platform is well-positioned to monetize the wisdom of crowds, which eventually secures its legitimacy.
Despite such an ambitious blueprint, the proposed ultimate platform, even though ideal for the time being, is not without its own limitations, which led us to propose future developments. In the real world, like packed animals, people rely on each other to survive and thrive. We count on other people’s recommendations to help us make decisions. Imitating and herding is a safe Darwinian bet that is wired in our genes. Whether it is chosen or imposed, and whether it is a sense of belonging or the desire to be productive by cutting through the clutter, we are infected by memes that define who we are. Those memes range from gestures that we make, expressions that we use, political candidates that we elect, food that we eat, songs that we sing, cloths that we wear, cars that we drive, books that we read, websites that we visit, etc. Such behavior is so ingrain in us that we carry it, not just in our real world, but the online one as well.
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