Trading on Social Currency
Tomorrow I'll be in Cape Town for the Net Prophet conference. One of the topics I plan on discussing is around the work we're doing at Swiftly.org with one of the SwiftRiver API's, RiverID which is a reputation data store that tries to digitally represent the currency of social exchange. What does that mean? For every interaction we have with others, something is being exchanged or displaced. For example - Someone asks for advice on doing your taxes and someone makes a reccomendation to speak to their attorney. What was exchanged there? It may seem as simple as question & answer but really far more has been transacted:
The person asking got the advice he or she needed.
The person asking can feel like the question was validated (in getting a response)
The person answering may incur favor in the future for being helpful.
The person answering may be incurring favor from the person he's recommended.
The person answering may have improved his or her own reputation, as well as the reputation of the person he's recommended.
The person answering has demonstrated their knowledge, and may become recognized as being a good source for such information.
Those are just a few, in reality the list of what's transferred in any social exchange goes on and on. Why does this matter?
Well, for one, online social activity presents the unique opportunity to collect, monitor and analyze elements of exchange that in the real world would be virtually impossible to capture. And though we indeed still can't measure all elements of social economies, we can begin to infer a great deal -- using what we can track using computers and online social activity.
In the digital space, the above scenario might play out differently, perhaps on a question and answer site like Quora. There, all the same transactions take place: a question is asked, someone answers and recommends someone else. Because these interactions occur in a computational, networked space, we can begin to actually dissect the market forces at work.