Zittrain & the Long Tail

In this week's readings Zittrain's Future of the Internet goes into detail on what aspects makes a product generative. He narrows it down to five basic attributes a product should have in order to be considered generative: Leverage, Adaptability, Ease of Mastery, Accessibility, and Transferability. Leverage is an aspect in a product that makes a task easier to do but also capable of doing many things. Zittrain states the more a system can do, the more capable it is of producing change. (p.71) Adaptability is how easily the system can be built on or modified to broaden its range of uses. Examples are: the Internet, Electricity, or a PC. The amount of tasks that can be created with the product or endless. Ease of Mastery, which is pretty self explanatory is how easy a product is for broad audiences to understand and use it. Accessibility is another important factor for a product to be generative. It involves how easy it is to obtain access to a product or object as well as the information needed to master it. Accessibility includes monetary value, availability, regulations, and secrecy. Lastly, Transferability is how easily changes in the product or technology can be conveyed to others, such as updating an application on your computer. How easy is that update going to be transferred?
Zittrain then goes into different theories and philosophies. Towards the end of the reading he discusses the historical beginnings and current process Wikipedia has gone through and how it works today. As well as mentioning the negative effects generative computers and Internet has cost us, such as malware and spam e-mails.  


Another reading, which I enjoyed more was Chris Anderson's The Long Tail because despite it discussing some economic features the Internet has created it discusses a topic most consumer's including myself are apart of. He discusses that lack of range in products physical stores lack, such as full range in movies, documentaries, books, and music. And the consumer market the Internet has created lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is much bigger and only getting bigger.


Anderson gives he's readers three rules to follow when having a marketplace on the web. First, make everything available in abundance and range of genre or topics. Such as the way netflix is with documentaries. Second, have low competitive prices. Lastly, Take into account what your customer likes and suggest similar things. 


As an avid consumer obviously Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes do a great job of this. Another aspect that isn't mentioned in depth that the Internet has created is ease of finding the best price for an item through some of the mentioned websites. For example, the other day I was looking on the Apple website for some speakers to buy for my iPhone and then decided to look for some cases. I honestly thought some of the products were overpriced and decided to look elsewhere for the same brand products at a lower price. When it came to cases, a friend of mine recommended the store Five Below which does not offer anything to be bought online but there was a store close to me. Instead of paying $30+ for a case at the Apple store, Five Below had the exact same brands as Apple for much less, only $5. I also found some of the same name brand speakers on Amazon at a more affordable price. In addition to the economic factors Anderson discusses the Internet has also created more competition that has benefitted the consumer in various ways.




- Nabila C.