Jeremy Ballenger on the Intention Economy

Jeremy Ballenger thinks the intention economy is staring us right in the face:

Technology and behaviours in an increasingly networked world indicate that success for the intention economy is only a matter of time. Applications will evolve and be refined, and our behaviours as buyers and people will change accordingly.

Look at blogging - tailors, plumbers, sheetmetal workers and attorneys are just some of the people now plying their trade in the blogosphere. In the not-too-distant future if my pipes burst, I should be able to tag a post about it and a plumber in my local area (using something as basic as a Technorati search) can find me and offer to fix them. Same goes for me whining that the shirts I buy don’t fit, or if I need legal representation. These are all examples of the same thing - incremental improvements allowing sales to stop...

...hustling new business rather than satisfying business standing right there...

These little developments happen daily and their confluence, the integration of approaches like 43things, Technorati and Microformats for example, is probably going to wind up be ing described as the intention economy. But that’s later - for now the discussion is still in infancy.

I could hazard a guess that the intention economy has already reached it’s tipping point, and we’ve all missed it because we thought we were looking at something else, the other things mentioned above that when conjoined, are actually delivering what we are looking for.

As I've said before, I don't see intention and attention in opposition to each other, but as complementary elements in the same system. In Jeremy's example above, by tagging a post to express a need for a service, he makes his intentions very clear: "I'm an interested, willing and ready buyer." And I think we're on the verge of seeing functional systems running on that basis.

But explicit, articulated gestures like tagging posts have some shortcomings. They require effort on the part of the user, they don't necessarily scale, and they're subject to gaming. In any number of circumstances, it will be preferable to infer intentions from data generated by implicit, behavioral gestures, i.e. attention data. The overall attention/intention economy will run on both explicit and implicit gestures, but once the necessary technical infrastructure is in place, the latter will be easier from the user's perspective, will scale better, and will be a lot tougher to game.

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+trust attention+data attention+economy intention+economy jeremy+ballenger