I filled up the car with gas for $1.97 a gallon a few days ago at one of this group of three gas stations about 5 miles from my house that have been selling gas for 20 to 40 cents less than everybody else ever since about the middle of September. There are a handful of single stations around the region who have been similarly discounting their prices.

I bet there is some great liturature on how gas station owners signal each other to assure that prices are set in a way that avoids driving them all out of business. So I’ve been wondering about this handful of stations that appear to have decided to ignore that and attempt to sell huge volumes of gasoline at very low mark ups. I find these self regulating markets thought provoking. Presumably the other gas stations in their local area are – ah- no pleased.

Turns out the three stations are owned by one guy. Yesterday the town showed up to install new curbs around one of his stations. The town didn’t bother to tell him they were comming. The town’s story is that some of his buyers were darting in and out of traffic and that better curbs would regulate things better.

This effectively shut down that station, in particular the gas delivery truck couldn’t get into the station. This stressed out the owner.

So he lowered prices for a hour to $1.04. Word quickly spread and the entire road was quickly backed up with eager buyers. His daughter says he lost $6,000. The town wants to charge him for the extra traffic police costs this triggered.

The owner’s stress level rose further. Apparently he then wrapped him self in the american flag, showed up at the stations, threatened suicide, and well had a nervous breakdown. He’s in the hospital now.

At this moment all three stations are closed, which I suspect made the rest of the stations in that part of town happy. I suspect there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Meanwhile the mess in the natural gas market looks like it’s just getting worse and worse.

“We need to declare a national crisis,” Andrew N. Liveris, the chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company.

eBay has decided to give access to their developer network and traffic thru their web APIs away for free. That’s almost two distinct decisions.

According to News.com, up until today developers paid eBay between $1.25 to $2.90 per 1,000 items listed and an annual fee of $500. (*)

They are leaving a lot of money on the table, an that doesn’t happen easily, so I’m always interested by firms that decide to give away their developer networks and or their APIs because internally it makes the developer network group dependent on internal politics for their funding. Which means that the firm must have a strong model for what value they get back from these activities. It doesn’t matter what you call them: open APIs, developer networks, etc. etc. the problem remains. Most firms won’t build these if they can’t clearly comprehend why.

Here’s a start at a list of why firms give this stuff away.

The simplest case to make arises you can draw a clear line from the usage of the open API to revenue in the heart of the firm’s business.

• for example eBay or Amazon can give away open API access if drives more transactions thru their marketplace,
• for example a programable logic array vendor can give away designs tools if that leads to increased component sales,
• for example Google can give away a mapping widget if they are confident of their ablity to float ads or capture traffic from it, or
• for example they can give away website analytics if it tends leads to increased add revenue.

You might do it to solve a search problem. Firms typically have lots of options for what to do with the stuff in their portfolio. Searching for
the best things to do is hard and risk.

• Part of what makes it hard is that firms are don’t know what problems customers have, only customers knowthat. So a toolkit given to customers who are close to real problems can overcome that problem. How was google to know that people needed a mapping widget to display cheap airline fares?
• Developers will take risks that firms won’t. For example a large firm will insist on creating a web site that is scalable, internationalized, etc. A small firm will defer that; and thus learn faster. Small firms are less regulated than large ones.
• All firms have cultures the define what they consider to be important. One firm may care about safety. Another about ad dollars. Another about cool user interface. These core values make it impossible for the firm to discover innovations that involve a different mix of core values.

You might do it to create a network of complements around your offering.

• Complements raise the percieved value of your offering. This is why people sometime switch from the more robust FreeBSD to the more richly complemented Linux.
• Complments can drive upgrade from version to version (if that’s your revenue model). For example there comes a time when I must upgrade my Mac’s OS to gain access to current versions of other software I use.
• Complements make your offering much more sticky because when the customer wants to switch you have to coordinate switching all the complementary products you use.

It can be a useful part of your pricing strategy:

• As a kind of free sample.
• As a kind of lead generator. Developers who adopt your open APIs are likely cantidates for adopting more pricy offerings.
• As a way to get the long tail of users unwilling to pay drawn into your network. This is particularly key if gain some positive value for your network from every participant.

Then there are the reasons that arise from a firms desire to shape the market dynamics around it.

• An open API can be used to set a standard, and having the industry standard flow from your firm maybe in your best interest.
• An open API can draw in a large number of smaller players, who’s cost of sale you couldn’t reasonably bear, and temper the power of the large players who’s cost of sale you can afford.

It maybe in your interest to commoditize an adjacent market so your core offering remains were the money is made in the value chain. For example one model of open source is that software developers would prefer to be paid for their work and eroding the power of IP rights holders to charge pushes the money away from them and toward the coders.

The motivation for any particular developer network is probably an 80/20 mix. With 80% of the motivation coming from just a few of these, and the remaining 20% comming from the rest. I suspect that over time the motivations shift. I’ll leave it to the reader to puzzle about what shifting motivations drove the eBay change in pricing.

I am a sinner! I am guilty. Yes, I too have pulled this stunt: baby pictures in your messaging. But, but, I only use the happy baby pictures to extract from my audience subliminal love for my message.

This vendor is subliminally attempting to trigger my love, my loyality. He want’s a hug. The email this image appeared in reminds me that I haven’t dropped by and used his service for over a year. This is much more evil than my happy baby pictures.

I’ve been wondering for some time now why we don’t see more software agents posting into del.icio.us. I wrote one a long time ago as part of some work I was doing; that agent would search for things that had been posted a lot and then tag them with the tag a.big.fat.one; it would masqueade as me when it posted. I wish I’d given it it’s own account, mr_trend_watcher say.

So. I see that Alex Bosworth has written a del.icio.us software agent. The agent’s account at del.icio.us is private.bookmarks; but let’s call him PB for short. When PB posts a URL for you he tags it as for you. You may not have known this but every del.icio.us user Sally has a page of URL’s tagged as just for her by other users. They do that by tagging them for:sally. Here are the URLs other folks have sent me sent to me, but unless you log in as me you can’t see them, sorry.

Oh, look! You can see everything than anybody asked Mr. PB to post “privately” for them. Mr. PB exhibits some very racy posting behavior. Mostly porn, but plenty of health issues, private login pages, tutorials, job search sites, etc.

The wise men in the ivory towers have spent a river of ink on the puzzles around agency. Do you trust Mr. PB to keep these secrets? Mr. PB is running at sandbox.sourcelabs.com; do you trust his hosts?

Mr. PB works via a bookmarklet and you can get one of your very own here, if you trust him. Oh darn, you can’t delete anything you’ve posted.

The solution is always just one gesture away.

Actually. Reading Billo’s rant reminds me how much fun it is to rant.

I used to have a coworker who specialized in ranting about the word “just”. He’d try to get people to stop using it. Somebody would say: “Just put it in a database.” or “Just schedule a meeting.” or “Just tell Sam to do it.” and he would be off and running. “Don’t use that word!”

I’m comming to feel the same way about “light weight” as in “Light weight scripting language.” “Light weight data store.” “Light weight presentation layer.”

Don’t do that!

Listened to Joshua Schachter answer questions at Berkman last night. He seemed to be at the end of a very long day. Many of the usual questions were asked and the usual answers were given.

Things I learned. You can now type delicious.com, rather than del.icio.us. But does that mean we can stop typing del.icio.us every time we talk about it? That “bacon” is a very delightful word for ambiguous search. Maybe we could introduce the term bacon for output of bad actors who’s spamming is more sophisticated than just spraying mass quantities at open systems.

I was a bit surprised by what appears to be the lack of any platform strategy; and of course I find that extremely lame. (And no, an API does not constitute a platform strategy!) People in the audience read lots of value propositions into his business. He seems very centered in the value of delicious as a means to help people capture the memorable.

I’ve long thought that delicious would be a fascinating opportunity to introduce some light weight group forming as a means to raising the bar on the quality of the tagging. But while they are intending to play the group card into the design space it appears that they don’t see that as a means toward raising quality, or even as an enabler of additional sociability. They have seen a demand for it, as they have seen a demand for privacy so they are chasing that demand.

In passing he mentioned how they would like to be able to enable some degree of account linking so sites could link up account info enough to help a user manage his things to remember stuff.

Two thinks linked up. He was working as a quant with a brokerage before. He’s curious about the possibility of finding trend spotters in his user base. Stock trading is all about buying before the crowd arrives and selling back when they do. Which is, of course, also somewhat the business that Ester Dyson and Tim O’Reilly are in. Two of his investors. I wonder if that’s a of a NYC mindset about things rather than a valley mindset? Of course crowds and social have some overlap; but they are quite differing attitudes about the group. Probably three things there: modeling the crowd’s behavior, shaping the crowd’s behavior, and encouraging the forming of crowds.

I’m a big believer that a web site that built in this manner, i.e. draw upon the lite contributions of a large pool of talent, is better off if its operators are conscious of what qualities they are attempting to aggregate. So for example my story about how everything2 went off in a particular direction by it’s emphasis on cool; or how wikipedia is has a heading set by the emphasis on neutral point of view, or how each of the open source enclaves has particular attributes they use to ground their work.

Most sites like these don’t manage this well. That comes, possibly, of a modern fetish for dismissing the value of planning with such vigor that any plan becomes suspect. They tend to settle into some attribute that then rises toward the top for reasons that have to do with the dynamics in and around the operators. Wikipedia is a good example because neutral point of view addresses an organizational and coordination problem; but is only slightly correlated with other qualities you might want in a reference work. It is an evolutionary approach; and tends to create curious mutations that happen to work rather than designed things.

That delicious is trying to be a good place for its users to remember stuff is pretty clearly an attribute that was written into it’s DNA early and still gets a lot of respect.

It looks like trend spotting, or some analogous term, is in its blood.

Memory aid for the trend spotting crowd, Makes for an interesting target audience. Interesting to contrast it with other attempts to serve that fickle mob. A developer net, a political activist, or an advertiser would be trying to shape and draw the crowds interests.