[lbo-talk] The lure of commercialization (was Re: About Twitter)

[Itamar Shtull-Trauring]

On Sat, 2009-08-15 at 05:13 -0400, Joseph Catron wrote:
> I'm afraid I lack the scientific basis to write the historical article
> that deserves to be written about Twitter, but isn't it one of the
> best examples of anti-capitalist innovation coming full circle and
> being fully adopted and marketed by capitalists? I distinctly remember
> using its predecessor, the TXTmob technology developed and deployed by
> the anarchist Institute for Applied Autonomy, at the Republican
> National Convention in 2004. And how long did it take the convention's
> funders (broadly defined) to catch on to this awesome new
> revenue-producing concept?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob

One caveat is that Twitter is not actually a revenue-producing
concept :)

However, a well documented example of such a process does exist: Google.
In the first paper they published about the search engine, then an
academic project, Brin and Page explain that one of their goals is to
provide an alternative to commercial search engines:

        Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search

        engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business

        model do not always correspond to providing quality search to

        users. ... For this type of reason and historical experience

        with other media, we expect that advertising funded search

        engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and

        away from the needs of the consumers.

        

        ...we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed

        incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search

        engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

(from http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a)