Jigsaw - creating a market for contact information
Anne Ferguson, my assistant, drew this one to my attention. The company in question, Jigsaw, is trying to create a market for contact information, using a variant of the ‘free labor’ theme I’ve written about before. Here’s the idea: Each member adds contact information (the more detailed, the better) into the Jigsaw database. For doing this, members get points added to their accounts. Members can then search for all the contacts in the database and access them for a charge of points. When you enter a new contact, or significantly update a contact, you “own” the contract. Whenever anybody “buys” the contact, you get a percent of the proceeds in terms of points. For points (or payment, I presume) the company will also help create customized lists for marketing purposes.
It’s an interesting idea—you swap your rolodex for the chance to have a peek at the information in someone else’s. Contacts, by the way, have no choice about being entered. I checked on my own information and found that someone had put me into the database, and I hadn’t even known it. I’m intrigued by the combination of incentives to share private information and the benefits promised if others leverage your private information. The “sell” on Jigsaw’s overview page says:
How Jigsaw Helps
Bypass gatekeepers. Go straight to decision makers and influencers. If you’re a salesperson, recruiter, marketer or business owner, Jigsaw will save you precious time.
Interesting that the company’s main selling point is to help people bypass gatekeepers whose job it is to protect the target contact from unsolicited communications. One wonders how long before those who would prefer their information to remain private initiate action to get Jigsaw to remove those private contact details.
- Posted: Monday, April 21, 2008
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The internet is an amazing place to test the concept of ‘emergence’. In a world of massive abundance, where parties can be connected in a network, things just ‘emerge’, without any form of real control. At the same time, these things often emerge in patterns, and sometimes these patterns can be predicted.
I mention this in relation to Jigsaw as:
1) it’s existence is the result of emergence (abundance of entrepreneurs, ‘small’ capital., people with desire to be connected, specific business needs, internet connectivity, development tools, etc)
2) the emergence of behaviors within the site itself
Most social networking concepts are inherently intriguing (humans like reading about themselves and others), but at the same time struggle with some inherent flaws. One of the key ingredients to a successful social networking system is critical mass, popularized by Gladwell in The Tipping Point. The problem faced by sites like Jigsaw, therefore, is not so much to have a compelling business concept (trading contacts - we have a winner!), but convincing enough people in the early stages of development to make contributions.
Now, social networks are much more likely to accelerate their growth than normal ‘linear’ business models. Simple math would show that 10 people dropping 100 names into the pile would quickly start building up a cross-referenceable database of people, and if these folks are strongly encouraged to invite others (as most social networking sites do), the network effects multiply rapidly.
Therefore, the odds of these models taking off are quite high, but the odds of them maintaining traction and becoming everyday tools are weirdly decreasing. The abundance of entrepreneurs and internet technologies means that competing networks can quickly be set up, whole contact lists ‘stolen’ and migrated into competing networks (i.e. LinkedIn offers to take Google & Yahoo mail accounts, Plaxo offered to take all LinkedIn accounts, etc).
We live in a very, very interesting world right now!
Mark Turrell
CEO, Imaginatik
[url=http://www.imaginatik.com]http://www.imaginatik.com[/url]
Blog: InnovationBBL
