Kevin Vogelsang

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the trend of disintermediation and its relation to the provision of capabilities to a larger audience.

An astute friend of mine, Alexander McMath, commented the following via FaceBook:

The flipside to the rise of disintermediation solutions usually has something to do with problems regarding quality assurance, scaling, and transactional authority (where applicable). It’s the idea that some value was being created by the intermediary.

Alexander hit the nail on the head with this one and stole the words right out of my mouth.

When a tool becomes highly accessible to a large group of people with low costs (little time, effort, etc.), a lot of people start using it.  A percentage of the users use the tool very well and create value.  A larger group of people use the tool sporadically and perhaps poorly, creating noise if not negative value.

The internet is the example of thousands of agents interacting on a platform.  Thank goodness for Google.  Google lets us find web pages that are relevant to our search terms (oh yeah, it’s a “decision engine” too…).  Google acts as a filtering tool.  But we’re only at the beginning of search on the web, and we’re only at the beginning of the need for better filtering.

Addendum:

I was at an informal meet-up with members of the Atlanta Technology Angels today, and Ron Conway, “the Godfather of Silicon Valley”, and his current investment focus on “real time data” services (Twitter is the primary example) came up at some point in the discussion.  If these real time data services are to be the next billion dollar market, bet your bottom dollar that there will only be an exponential need in better filtering.

Kevin
7.23.2009