Encouraging Something Really Different

In Fred's post yesterday he introduced one of USV's new investments. This is nothing new and he included back-links to previous USV investment announcements of products like Twitter, from all the way back in 2007, as proof.

I encourage everyone to read the Twitter write up in full, but I want to highlight the following excerpt because - surprise, surprise - it reminds me of Cent:

"...blogging lacks the banter that characterizes most forms of live conversation.

Twittering[sic] is an emerging new form of communication on the Internet that changes the expectations associated with other forms of communication and yet it's fundamentally different than blogging. Twitter provides a platform for banter that blogging doesn't and it's available in so many places via IM, mobile text messaging, or the Web that it induces a different sort of behavior. Twitter encourages people to adapt and invent behavior to suit their needs."

Actually what surprised me most was Fred's comment re: the lack of a platform for banter on blogs, since Fred's personal blog has been a source of extensive banter for so long (comments were always there even before he switched to Disqus after USV invested in it). But I get that the comment section on personal blogs is a super limited platform, no matter how many people leave comments.

That's where Twitter and it's platform of instantly available global communication really stood out. And atop that platform a myriad of uses and novel behavior emerged as more and more users signed up.

In the case of Cent, the incorporation of a non-trivial bounty that can be attached to posts has created a powerful platform for incentivizing anything, potentially.

Users are already adapting and inventing new behaviors. In it's current form, Cent appears to resemble a Quora-like Q&A site, but it's actually something much more fundamental than that. It's really a platform for anyone to post something with guaranteed responses - users are able to incentivize dialogue.

As the UI/UX expands to provide a place for original content creators to post and make their digital home, I am certain that the power and potential of this platform for guaranteed dialogue will not only become more apparent, but it will grow in power by multiple orders of magnitude.

Happy weekend everybody.