Building a sociable prediction market at Nostradamical
Crowdsourcing…eh?
Hi folks, this is the first post of the Nostradamical.com blog. What is Nostradamical.com? It is a project I have been developing for the last year or so that was inspired primarily by James Surowiecki’s seminal book, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. The book suggests that often, and under the right conditions, crowds can make overall better decisions that individuals. Known sometimes as ‘collective intelligence’, ‘crowdsourcing’, or ‘collaborative filtering’, the concept is sweeping the Web 2.0 world by storm with other great sites like Delicious and Threadless taking the lead.
The book got me thinking, if crowds can make better decisions that individuals could large crowds of people work together to predict the outcome of future events with better overall success than individuals? This is how Nostradamical.com was born.
So, what is a ‘prediction market’?
The site is technically what is known as a ‘prediction market’. Members make a prediction and invite others to ‘hedge a bet’ on the future outcome, given what they know and believe. If the prediction later turns out to be true participants gain from it in terms of some sort of (non financial) return. In the case of Nostradamical the return is increased ‘Vision’ measured in ‘Future Minutes’ (influenced I have to say by the fairly average Nicholas Cage film, ‘Next’).
Great, what’s in it for me?
So what is the benefit of all this for the members of the site? Why would someone take time to participant in a group prediction? Indeed this is the ‘flaw’ in the system that author Jeff Howe points out in his book, ‘Crowdsourcing’. Well the benefit in this case is that Nostradamical is a ‘microblog’ that allows people to publish their opinions to friends, peers and the world wide Blogosphere, in a fast and easy way. So the benefit is recognition. Users can sign up, create a prediction and in minutes publish it to blog search engines like Technorati.com, that tracks 120 million blogs worldwide. Without having your own blog you can publish your opinions and get heard by the masses. 120 million bloggers are doing it already and they can’t be wrong, can they?
The site has many social aspects to it, including Facebook-style ‘friends & associates’, Google maps integration for geo-mapping of worldwide predictions, and eventual integration with Facebook, Bebo and other social networking applications. The site is not a ‘destination’, it is an application that does one thing well and is designed to integrate with your existing and favourite apps. Nostradamical is a sociable take on a prediction market.
From then until now…
The project has been running for the past year and has taken quite some time to develop, with many aspects having gone through rework several times. Several burning questions have taken time to fine tune and are still under ‘iteration’. For example, how do you make group predictions appealing to others? How do you reward participation? How do you stop last minute speculating? How do you stop ‘group think’ where users just follow the crowd? How do you reward for success and penalise for failure? Do you reward the group for success even if individuals fail in their predictions? What kind of time horizon do you limit predictions to in order to make them more appealing? All good questions…now answers…(for the moment).
Technology
The application has been developed in the excellent and versatile Ruby on Rails platform, thanks to the feedback and help of many thousands of Ruby on Rails community members. Ruby on Rails is the future.
Oh, and who is Nostradamus?
Glad you asked. Nostradamus was of course the infamous seer that lived in the 14th century and prophecised about future events even into the 20th century. More info at Wikipedia and at the entire site dedicated to him, http://www.nostradamus.org/.
Want to get involved? We love feedback.
The site is now in final alpha testing and the private beta is due for launch next month. If you want to sign up now ahead of the official beta launch by all means click here – your opinions and feedback are all really appreciated! Note there may be a wait of a few weeks if you sign up now. Watch this space!
