VIA Interaction

Monday, April 17, 2006

The Perfect Market

People have talked about the Internet enabling "the perfect market" - where everyone has access to all the information they need to make economic decisions.

We've all been watching that come to pass. Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner, in Freakonomics, have written about the dangers Realtors face as information becomes more available - information is the marketplace where real estate agents find their margins.
I remember cajoling my real estate agents to loan me their copy of the MLS guide, which listed all properties for sale in the area. Now realtor.com provides that information to anyone.

Third-party services like Google's Froogle create catalogs for consumer goods and enable customers to find the best prices.

New to the scene is Yahoo's Fare Chaser, which enables you to search just about every travel site there is for he best airfares. It's a rich internet application, meaning that it uses AJAX to create a slick user interface that updates itself without refreshing the Web page.

I looked for flights from Portland to Cleveland today and got a tremendous amount of options and information.

When developing Web sites we are constantly faced with decisions about how much to disclose about ourselves, or acknowledge market conditions that are less than ideal. With the way the Web is developing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore what is going on beyond your own Web site. The challenge is figuring out how to best fir into this new reality.

(I picked up Fare Chaser from today's New York Times: For Travelers, a Way to Save More Dollars While Using Fewer Clicks.)

posted by Tim Beidel at 4/17/2006 10:30:00 AM

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