My first post-college employer, Accenture (nee Andersen Consulting), suffered serious whiplash on Wall Street yesterday:
That’s what it looks like when a trading error and automated reactive systems drive a stock from $40 to $0.01.
Somebody got fired yesterday. And somebody else got really, really rich.
Huffington Post, that daily anthology of impossibly voluminous blogging, celebrity opinion, and general liberal-slant news creation, has always sat right on the sharpest edge of new media. One of the things they do best is adopting the features of community platforms for a news site.
So it was no surprise when I clicked on a HuffPo link my wife IMed me today, and saw this:
HuffPo is getting into the badge universe, adopting the game techniques that Jesse Schell so eloquently detailed last February.
Of course, the problem with social currency is the same as all currencies. Issue too much, and it devalues. Scarcity, and the competition such scarcity breeds, is key to a successful social rewards strategy. All social economies thus require a “Fed” to manage the currency supply.