In yesterday’s blog post, I asked what I thought was a pretty interesting question, “what would it be like if there was perfect access to information about products and services you want to consume?”.  Today, I want to tackle the question of just how reasonable that thought is.  How possible is it that we’ll reach a situation where there is perfect information in the market?

It occurred to me on Saturday that being this optimistic might not be completely crazy.  Two observations made me realize this.  First, I saw another one of my friends post something positive about @comcastcares.  The way that service’s good reputation has spread so quickly by word of mouth (or tweet of mouth) underscores how good the market information is becoming.  Not only do I not live in an area that Comcast services, I don’t even have television, but I’ve still heard of the @comcastcares program.  The second observation came when I selected a restaurant Saturday afternoon in Bradenton Florida.  I was in a town I’d never been to with only one other person I knew, but I asked over 250 people what restaurant they recommended.  Between four square and Google local, my phone knew what at least 10 people thought about every restaurant in the area.  One wonders how much longer bad restaurants will make it.

I’ve started brainstorming the conditions necessary for this world of perfect information, but I’d love to have your thoughts:

• I’m not saying there wouldn’t be advertisers; I’m just saying they wouldn’t be able to misrepresent themselves in any way.  Their participation in the discussion / pool of information would only contribute to the market’s consciousness.  This requires that if any advertiser says something inaccurate or misleading, enough people say BS quickly that few if any are fooled.
• A much higher percentage of the population would need to review businesses and products using social media.  I don’t know what that tipping point is, probably something like 40 or 50 percent of the public.  Does anyone have a reliable figure for what percentage of the public already do this?
• There needs to be some standardization of the tools used for local reviews.  This market consolidation will happen as the market matures.  Gowalla, Yelp and FourSquare all require market dominance for their business models to work.  One of them will become the facebook of local review.
• The ability to review products needs to be a bit more standardized.  The reviewing of products that are widely available suffers from the opposite problem of the review of restaurants.  If I Google “HP Computers”, I will find 50 people that swear by them and 50 people that hate them.  What I need is a way to tell which of those reviews were written by people most like me and how many people found them effective.  Think this sounds unreasonable?  It’s not.  Check out what @Hunch is up to.  If I could find reviews from people at hunch who are like me, I’d be all set.

So those are my quick thoughts, I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.