Call it Occam&#8217-s razor, minimization of information entropy, or just KISS principle. Call it &#8216-less is more&#8216-, usability or just common sense.

The question is, are the currently available prediction markets web services compliant with the era of attention economics? Are we able to attract a critical mass of users, thereby surpassing the tipping point needed to turn the mechanism of markets to a typical decision support and forecasting tool?

If a picture is worth a thousand words and assuming that a website&#8217-s source code is an unbiased descriptor of its complexity, I attempted to take a look at the homepages of some popular prediction markets web services, using this &#8216-websites as graphs&#8216- tool. In the results that follow, each cycle represents an html tag.

• intrade

• hsx

• newsfutures

• thewsx.com (by consensus point)

• buzz game of yahoo, a source of inspiration to me

• my beloved inkling markets

• our approach at askmarkets.com (yet in alpha version)

P.S.: I didn&#8217-t include betfair because the graph occurred wasn&#8217-t descriptive of the true complexity of their homepage.

Cross-posted by gtziralis.com.