Call it Occam’s razor, minimization of information entropy, or just KISS principle. Call it ‘less is more’, usability or just common sense.
The question is, are the currently available prediction markets web services compliant with the era of attention economics? Are we able to attract a critical mass of users, thereby surpassing the tipping point needed to turn the mechanism of markets to a typical decision support and forecasting tool?
If a picture is worth a thousand words and assuming that a website’s source code is an unbiased descriptor of its complexity, I attempted to take a look at the homepages of some popular prediction markets web services, using this ‘websites as graphs’ tool. In the results that follow, each cycle represents an html tag.
- buzz game of yahoo, a source of inspiration for us
- my beloved inkling markets
- our approach at askmarkets.com (yet in alpha version)
