Umair Haque writes a blog called BubbleGeneration that I like a lot.  His writing has consistently helped me expand my thinking in many ways.  He recently commented on my post about why avatars are the web’s most undervalued asset today:

“Controlling the emotional intensity of an industry is an incredibly powerful source of advantage in the post-network economy.

But that’s a small part of the reason avatars are valuable.

The truth is that the post-network economy is an interaction economy. The avatar is a focal point for interaction - a sticky, context independent, information-rich focial point…which should be enough to explain why they can also be explosive focal points for value creation.”

I think we are actually making the same point, we’re just using different words to describe it. 

Whenever I evaluate a new consumer startup, what I am constantly ruminating is “What is the relationship between this service and the user who uses it? Is it a weak emotional relationship or a strong emotional relationship?  What is the nature of this relationship - is borne of need or desire?” and so on. 

I care about this because emotional intensity has a direct correlation with 1) how much attention a user is willing to spend on any given product/topic (Quantity) and 2) the Quality of the interaction the user is likely to have with this service.  Emotional intensity creates option value for the service provider. 

Think about your most recent romantic relationship.  The stronger you feel about someone, the more likely it is that you are going to 1) spend more time with that person and 2) explore the depths of the relationship’s possibilities.

As we are moving into an era where attention is the most valuable currency and the user is pummelled with more content they could possibly consume in a lifetime, the strength of one’s emotional connection with a service, a brand, or a product is of utmost importance.  The dominant strategy for creating defensible unfair advantage around your product in Web 2.0 was community and the associated network effects.  But in a world where every single service has deployed a community platform with identical feature sets, how do you differentiate? It’s not enough to deploy communication platforms, user profiles, and voting tools.  Social game mechanics help, because they lay the foundation for a number of different emotion states: tension, exhilaration, accomplishment, delight, etc.  

As product designer, your role is similar to that of a conductor of a large symphony.  Only, your instruments are peoples’ emotion states.  Each user experience is the orchestration of numerous emotion states.  The value of a customer to you is completely correlated with his/her set of emotional reactions.  To add complexity, the timber of each note varies by instrument and by person.  For example, the emotional footprint of surprise is different than that of longing.  Surprise has a big high and tapers off, leaving it with a short tail.  Some people may be frustrated by a feeling of longing, whereas some people may find it stimulating.  Ad infinium.

In short, this matters because emotional intensity is the most important filter by which people determine how to spend their time and energy.  If you understand what the emotional relationship with your user feels like, you can then figure out what the possible range of monetization opportunities might be.