After attending the Barry Schwartz presentation about “The Paradox of Choice” at Shop.org’s Annual Summit back in September, I was excited to read his book of the same name. Schwartz points out that despite the fact that people with more choices may, in the long run, end up with a better overall outcome, they will be less satisfied with that outcome. This is because an endless supply of choices leads to stress, added effort to find the best choice, and regret after the choice is made. These ideas really struck a chord with me, as I myself am a “maximizer”, someone who insists on finding the very best solution even when others that are more easily available would serve me almost as well with far less effort, so I quickly found the book at a local library.

Although the Shop.org presentation was geared towards retailers aiming to offer a better experience to their customers via less stressful choice, I read the book for my own personal gain. If I could learn to “satisfice” instead of “maximize”, according to Schwartz, I’d be a happier guy. Unfortunately, the book spend most of its 288 pages trying to convince me that choice is a problem — a fact of which I was convinced during his speech — and offered little advice for how to avoid the pitfalls of choice and become happier. As GI Joe told me, knowing is half the battle, so I suppose that the book’s seemingly endless examples of choice paradoxes will only serve to help me recognize maximizing situations in the future, but I still could not help wishing there was more of a solution in sight.

One thing I do like about The Paradox of Choice is that it doesn’t have a catchy name that includes barking cats or purple cows. It presents actual ideas with real examples. Its a quick read, so check it out.

There was a lot of talk at the recent shop.org Annual Summit about how broadband has finally achieved critical mass and how this supposed web 2.0 revolution is poised to take advantage of this trend. 50% of internet homes are now broadband, and on average more than 80% of online purchases are made via broadband connections.

One of the conference’s keynote speakers suggested that the broadband penetration would increase to at least 80% of all internet homes by 2010 (perhaps a conservative estimate as moderate-speed DSL can already be had in many markets for around the same price as dialup). This statistic was used to suggest that the time has finally come to get agressive about targeting broadband customers.

I, however, see a different situation on the horizon; in 2010 when those dialup holdovers are finally embracing what we currently consider to be broadband, the speeds us early adopters will be using will be far, far faster than what we considering today.

Already, Verizon offers a 768k DSL product and a 15MB FIOS product, and Comcast just announced a 16MB product called Blast!; if trend continues this gap will continue to grow. Applications, graphics and videos that we currently consider for the top of the line “broadband” users will become the lowest common denomenator, and perhaps HD imagery and video will be the expectation of “high” broadband users (the early adopters).

Surely we should embrace the broadband of now and continue to monitor its progress, however as the details change, we also must keep in mind that although the details may change, the challenges may remain the same.

As suspected, a lot of discussion at the recent shop.org Annual Summit was devoted to social networking and how it can be leveraged by e-retailers. Although much of the conversation revolved around adding SN tools to commerce sites (Customer Reviews being the most popular), many suggested leveraging external tools such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. to drive both brand messaging and site traffic.

What worries me about this is not unlike the concerns I expressed recently about blogs — will the commercialization of these sites render them obsolete? The great thing about MySpace is that individuals are able to publish their thoughts and opinions, hook up with other like-minded people and have a place on the web to call their own. Sites like YouTube and Flickr flourish because the content is generated by average people, not companies, and as such it is fresh, interesting and exciting. If, on the other hand, every other MySpace page becomes a company promoting some product or agenda, or it becomes harder to find videos on YouTube that were uploaded purely for entertainment and for no other reason, these sites will lose thier cool, and thus their audience.

On a related note, I remember when I first started using eBay back in 1998 — there were phenomenal deals *everywhere*. It quickly became a daily stop on my surfing adventures. Sure, the overall assortment of product was not what it is today, but it didn’t matter. The site succeeded because it was something special in a world of sameness. Nowadays, I hardly ever use eBay because it is so cluttered with people who are more interested in profit margin than getting rid of their stuff. When I do look for something there, I regularly find items that are going for more than I could buy them new at Amazon or another web vendor. Great deals reminiscent of the past can be found occasionally, but they have become the exception rather than the rule.

Are MySpace, YouTube and Flickr next to suffer from oversaturation? If retailers continue to look for ways to profit from these wonderfully organic mediums, I fear that this will be the case.