Let’s start with the good news: We’re pretty close to making a decision about what service to bring to market. It took many long, sometimes heated debates, and in the end, Javier, our team coach had to play tiebreaker.

The bad news is that we have also decided, for the moment, not to make the choice public. We are aware, of course, that we are thereby going back on our promise to be open. But going public now would almost certainly kill our idea. The concept will not be easy to pull off in any case, in terms of developing an impressive website. But it also involves building relationships with several constituencies, both within The Economist Group and outside it.

What we can say, however, is that the core of our product will be a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.

While we develop something that is presentable, we will blog about the ideas that we considered implementing, but ultimately chose not to (which doesn’t mean that other units of The Economist Group may not themselves decide to take them up). So stay tuned.

Thanks again for submitting your idea to Project Red Stripe, the small team set up by The Economist Group to develop innovative services online. We’re now done sifting through and further developing the ideas sent in - and are about to make the decision on which of them we will take to market.

If you’d like to help us make this decision, please read the idea summaries we’ve posted on our blog on recent days and add your comments. Here are the links to the summaries:

- Prediction Markets
- Miscellaneous
- Managing information
- Kids
- Wikis
- Comments, mashups and tagging
- Data services
- Ze Frank
- Social Networks

If any of these summaries inspire you to another idea - please don’t hesitate to add it to the lot. And of course, we’ll keep you posted about our decision on our blog.

The eighth (and last) in the series on the ideas we received

“C’mon, this is obvious. Social networking site for subscribers to The Economist”, writes Vinay Gupta, in response to our invitation for idea submissions. Yet even though social networks are all the rage online, we did not receive many submissions suggesting we take this route. One has to wonder why.

Perhaps it is because The Economist Group’s various businesses are primarily regarded as old-style “mainstream media”. Nonetheless it is clear that a sense of community, of shared interest and passion for this “newspaper” does already exist amongst Economist readers. How often is it that a faint smile of recognition or camaraderie sneaks across your face when you, as an Economist reader, see a fellow commuter reading The Economist on the morning train on the way to work? Surely this sense of shared values could be readily built upon within the online environment.

What, then, would an Economist social network look like? It makes sense to start by defining social networking and giving a few examples of existing sites. Offline the term refers to “a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations, such as financial exchange, friendship, hate…”, to quote Wikipedia. Online, it is pretty much the same thing, with the interaction is mostly driven by commenting on and sharing photos, music, videos and blogs.

The “purest” examples of the social networking site are the likes of MySpace and . They attract huge numbers of users: MySpace is the third, Facebook the sixth-most popular site in the US, with 106m and 18m members respectively (for more information see this recent study by Jupiter Research). These sites are open to anyone to join. They allow users to set up a personal profile and then allow the user to tap into an existing network within the service, further expanding personal connections by interacting with others profiled on the site.

Then there are business-oriented social networks, most notably . Billed as “a place to find and leverage professional opportunities”, it is essentially a contact network and mainly used to find or to list jobs. Users in search of a new position, for instance, usually update their resumee and check whether any of their existing contacts could introduce them to a company’s hiring manager. In contrast to MySpace and Facebook, however, there are rules of engagement. Contacting another user requires either a pre-existing relationship or the intervention of a third user who is already linked to the previous two. Such an arrangement is intended to build trust among the service’s users.

Still, even in the case of LinkedIn with its 9m members, the question arises as to how effective and sustainable a community of this size can be (many users, for instance, are just lurkers - see chart above). It is for this reason that I, like some others, believe the future of social networking sites will belong to niche networks. The “space” (web speak for “market”) seems to be moving in this direction: sites that let users build their own network (such as Ning), have a local focus (Tribe, which was recently acquired by Cisco) and are established around more specific areas of interest (snowvision.com) are gaining momentum.

Yet the best example for an exclusive social network is aSmallWorld, an invitation-only community for the global jetset. It was founded by Erik Wachtmeister, a former investment banker and the son of a Swedish ambassador to the US, who saw the need for connecting a very affluent community of international jet setters. It is purported to include and Ivana Trump in its membership.

To the nearly 130,000 members of aSW, as they call it, the site is mostly a social channel. They use it to hook up with fellow members when visiting a new city, ask what social events or venues to look out for, as well as making their luxury holiday homes available to peers. Think of this network as an online version of the high-end crowd you would expect to gather in places such as Saint Tropez or Monaco.

Predictably, aSW’s rules of engagement strongly illustrate one of the key challenges of social networks: ensuring a suitable interaction between members. To keep the mob out, invitations can only be issued by certain key members of the community (in fact, if the person you invited misbehaves, this will refelect badly on you: “We expect members to be accountable for people they invite into aSmallWorld”, it says in the site’s FAQ’s).

There are plenty of rules the violation of which can make you end up in “aBigWorld”, an online penetentary of sorts: inappropriate language in one of the discussion forums, virtual pestering and if too many of your invitations to fellow members to join your network of friends get rejected or ignored (even in this exclusive online world, trying to get too close to Paris Hilton will get you in trouble). Anyone annoyed by another member can click on one of the omnipresent “abuse” buttons.

“What actions can a webmaster implement to sort out a troublemaker?
The webmasters’ powers are impressive and ubiquitous. But so too are their compassion and understanding. Webmasters can send a warning to a member, clip privileges to invite new members or connect with other members, clip the ability to participate in the forum, send to exile in aBigWorld, or terminate a member’s account.”

(from the aSmallWorld FAQs)

An Economist social network could certainly do without such Orwellian rules. Still, the model I envisage would be closer to aSW than MySpace, FaceBook or even LinkedIn. The Economist, because of its issue-focused and critical content is already a platform of common interest for its readers. As “Free Exchange” (a blog on Economist.com) and “Inbox” (where all letters to the editor are published, except for the abusive ones, that is) demonstrate, there is much potential for lively interaction between Economist readers.

Yet interesting debates are only one type of “content” that a community of readers could “generate” (to stick with the trade’s terminology). Like aSW, an Economist social network could allow readers to hook up, be it online or offline (during the next trip to San Francisco, for instance), as well as helping each other find the best hotels and restaurants (think of user-generated Economist Cities Guides). Members could even help Economist journalists do research (like Assignment Zero, an experiment in pro-am journalism), or use the network as platform to mobilize for action on offline projects and issues (after all, the Economist was founded 1843 in opposition to the protectionist Corn Laws).

So a social network for Economist subscribers is indeed quite obvious. Perhaps even so obvious that it would not be very innovative for Project Red Stripe to create one – since The Economist is likely to soon start integrating all kinds of community features in its website anyway.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to social networks.)

Patrick Tullmann drew my attention to zefrank.com. I guess this is what happens when you live in China and your bandwith is not that great - you miss out on something where you thought, “hey, how come I’m just finding out about this now?”. I remember when the ideas starting coming in that I spent quite some time looking at Ze’s web site and thinking that ‘he’s got it’ - in fact, since then, his site is probably sitting in the back of my mind when we discuss, as a group, issues and questions about the future, such as “Will individuals will be able to make money from their blogs?”.

For those of you who are willing to watch, here’s a 20-minute, highly entertaining and very informative speech from Ze. It provides great background information about him and his accomplishments.

Pat was drawing my attention to The Show, Ze’s year-long experiment in video which ended earlier this year. A great description of the project can be found in the but to quote from the story:

{Ze} built his website (zefrank.com) into a playground for interactive Internet projects, while exploring these ideas as a speaker, university instructor and consultant. Curious to see if his ideas about online video held water, he enrolled himself in improv classes, and started The Show as a year-long experiment.

Pat elaborates on this idea further and how it might relate to The Economist.

Ze’s show accepts both content and direction from the users, but every show has a strong and clear direction provided by Ze (it is very clearly his show, even though viewers have provided intros, ideas, songs, video and stills). He posits ideas and directions, asks for input and material, and combines the results into something that is most likely not exactly what he expected, but generally something stronger and larger. But still imprinted with his style. Similarly, the strong and consistent presence of the current editorial board of the Economist and its journalists would provide the same consistent and open slant on the news that the Economist has always had.

There are some interesting things about The Show. This Business Week article points out that Ze had signed a deal with Rewer Video to have his videos hosted on their web site in return for revenue share. I’m not sure if he has changed partners to Blip but regardless, you won’t find The Show on . This means he can share ad revenue with Blip when people look at his archive of videos. What I also like is that he uses video to encourage experiments and generate ideas. He doesn’t create a page that might be a ‘call to action’. You don’t read a manifesto. You watch a video and then you act. And Ze’s sports racers have acted. You can see a list of completed projects on Ze’s wiki. You can also see current projects which are active on the ORG (need to register).

It would be great to use The Economist’s platform in a similar way to launch ‘experiments’. It would be great to have The Economist also think beyond print. As we discuss and debate some of the ideas which have come in and some that we had come to the table with already, we increasingly start to ask about how can we get The Economist’s audience more involved. While The Economist might not be designing our German kid a t-shirt, I could see Economist sports racers writing their own play.

The seventh in the series on the ideas we received

As I’ve written previously, I think data is fun. Understandably a lot of the submissions revolve around data, and the possibilities in this area are massive. With a ton of the stuff in Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) vaults and a huge community of economists, what couldn’t we do? In the main, the ideas submitted revolve around three issues :

• make data free
• make it interactive
• show the links between data

“Information wants to be free” is a commonly held tenet by webbies. The expression was coined by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. It is worth reading the entire quotation :

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The argument goes that due to the elimination of distribution costs by the web we should now distribute this data for free. This would be a valuable service due to the EIU’s enormous info stash. This information is current and historical, giving us the opportunity to give away feeds of old data sets and up-to-the-minute info.

Giving away the data for free is the first thread of ideas, but the key is to make it interactive. An EIU data API would then put the tools in the hands of our users who would be able to create all manner of wonderful graphs, tables and visualisations. (What’s an API? An API is data that can be reused by developers. Companies give away their data in publicly usable APIs thinking that the ideas of the public at large will be more innovative than their own). By opening the data up to the collective intelligence of Economist Groupers, we’d definitely get some brilliant insights.

The value of this type of service can be seen in the sites Swivel and Many Eyes which share data sets and then give readers the chance to create interesting visualisations. Here are some of my favourites on Many Eyes:

• 100 top Bible Characters by Frequency and Dispersion
• CO2 Emissions in 2003
• Distribution of Guitar Shops by US State

The best headline we had from this set of ideas was Give The World Your Curves. Naturally, he was referring to the curves of the graphs in the Economic Indicators section of The Economist, and suggesting that they should be customisable on the web. This is clearly an idea that just makes sense. I remember a Canadian telling me how annoyed he was that he never saw Canada listed in any of our tables. The magazine has also dropped one page from this section, annoying numbers freaks. That wouldn’t happen at Curves Online because it costs nothing to have an extra page (that might not be the best name for the section).

The last group of ideas concentrated on the idea of showing the links between data. Super Size the Big Mac Index (another great name) wanted to use the fast food industry as a prism through which to go deeper into society. After extreme weather damaged the US tomato crop in 2005, tomatoes were removed from standard burgers. The idea leant itself to examinations of unionism, environmental issues and agro-industrialisation.

This deeper insight was in contrast to Paul Pedley’s (disclosure: Paul works for the EIU) desire for us to save him time, by quickly showing the inter-relationships between data. Information overload is a messy reality for any number of data professionals so a page that visualised these links would save time.

Naturally the issue here is that the EIU charges money for the data so why make it free? There are a few ways of looking at this. The easiest way would be to liberate some of the data. This could be toyed with by developers and manipulated in an interesting fashion and, by spreading this out, we’d in fact be advertising the EIU. More radical, though, would be turning a business with a few subscribers into one with many more monetised customers.

There are many ideas around data but here’s the nub: the tools that web developers now have in their hands mean that data can be freed from the two dimensional representations that we have today. Multimedia tools, from Flash to Google Maps, mean that data can be turned into compelling stories. Whether we do anything on this during Project Red Stripe remains to be seen, but I think The Economist Group should take advantage of this, and quickly.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to data.)

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Update : Show’s how much I know. It turns out an API is not the data from a site, but a way of accessing the data from a site. This shows not only my ignorance, but also that you don’t have to know all the technical stuff to love the web. The technology’s not the exciting stuff, the ideas that it enables are.

The sixth in a series on the ideas we received

We’ve been well impressed with the ideas that we have received. While many people sent in short ‘thoughts’, others made a great effort to write clear and concise descriptions of their ideas. Again, we felt that there would be many Web 2.0 ideas submitted and we did get a fair number of ideas about comments, mash-ups and tagging.

Augmento (an internet alias) felt that many people discuss Economist articles and in other discussion forums and that by not allowing our readers to comment on articles we are losing our community and potential ad dollars. Yes, we don’t have comments on our articles on Economist.com but I would point Augmento in the direction of Democracy in America and Free Exchange where we are engaging readers in discussion.

Andy Morrall suggests that we could collate comments/letters to the editor into a digest which could then be published as its own article. Andy suggests one topic which would have benefited from a digest of letters to the editor: our article about Bush and Kyoto.

Lee Mauger wrote in to suggest that we partner with to “provide Economist analysis within the Google Earth environment”. Lee suggests that this economic and political analysis would work well with traditional travel guides about countries and cities. Having been seconded from the Economist Intelligence Unit, I’m a big believer in this idea. I must admit that I always bring along the most recent Country Report (or, for Viewswire subscribers, the one-click report) anytime I am visiting a new place. Okay, at US$525/country report, it’s slightly more expensive than your average travel guide but perhaps the EIU could offer a product which would work with Google Earth. The EIU covers 200 countries so you would be hard pressed to find an area of the world that we don’t cover. Presenting information from the EIU and The Economist in a visual mash-up with Google Earth is a very tempting idea.

One reader, who describes himself as a “former political staffer”, wrote in to suggest that we “let interest groups and ordinary citizens mark up legislation before it goes to the floor of Congress”. I can see this idea working wiki-style and being applied to legislation in any country, and perhaps other important documents like trade agreements, , and strongly-worded documents. It also fits in very nicely with two lesser known brands of The Economist Group: European Voice and Roll Call. Victor Kostyuk wrote it to suggest that we “take the informativeness of Wikipedia, social organization of , comment rating systems of Slashdot and , and mix it all with an overarching flexibility to add meta-content of one’s choice to every piece of the world wide web”. I’m using Firefox which enables me to that have been posted about particular web pages on different blogs. If you have the plug-in and are using Firefox, if you click on the link above for manifestos (or even for the Firefox site itself) you’ll find that there are numerous comments related to the content on that page.

And finally, Bob suggests that we link human and machine resources to The Economist. The Economist already brings readers together for conferences and through our own , Corporate Network. But we certainly don’t tap the unused cycles of readers’ computers. Bob reminds us that we “should not underestimate trust that subscribers have in The Economist”. In return for tapping users’ computers, Bob suggests that The Economist would allow early access to its research and stories for those who are part of the network. Not a bad business model but, as Bob reminds us, “your lawyers will have to work out liability”.

(In addition to those mentioned in this post, we would like to thank all those who have contributed suggestions related to comments, mash-ups and tagging.)

I suspect that this is a one day only offer.

There are some pre-requisites:

• Windows XP/Vista (Mac and Linux support coming soon)
• Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Firefox 1.5+ with the Google Toolbar
• Round-front or elongated toilet providing at least 1.0 gallons per flush
• Use of automatic toilet bowl cleaners is not recommended

Here are some screen shots, (just in case it’s not there tomorrow!). Click to enlarge.

Intro

Installation

How it works