Well it had to happen - starting this Friday Facebook starts a personals section that they will call Marketplace.The core of eBay's success is that it created an ecology of Trust that enabled people who did not know each other to safely do business. Facebook approaches this from another angle. It has created communities of Trust that now can do business with each other, In effect, it has recreated the Village Market where true personal reputation is the underlying currency.I sense that this is the beginning of something very important that Doc Searls talked about last year at Reboot. The new marketplace will no longer be anonymous but social. Transactions will be embedded inside not a legal but inside a social framework that is more trustworthy than a legal framework.Whilst some speakers still spoke about how to make a better commerce website, many such as Doc Searls,Euan Semple, J P Rangaswami and Lee Bryantwere clear. Community and personal reputation will increasingly beamplified by social software and will creates "Places" in whichcommerce will take place, just as markets themselves were once socialspaces. Participation is not a feature of this emerging paradigm butits centrality. Community will be the container into which things willhappen directly between people. Social relationships and hence trustwill be the critical factors.As we have seen in the last 3 years, it is foolish to trust the legal aspects of a transaction where faceless institutions hide behind the law. Think of how big pharma has behaved or how your phone company wishes to hide from you.If I was to sell a friend my car or rent my cottage to a friend both sides are really on the hook to deliver not just the item and the money but a car that works and that the renter behaves well in my cottage.With 22 million members and counting - Facebook has the kind of scale that makes this very exciting - no wonder the faceless institutions hate and fear it so much. In their bones they know that this type of social power can take them down and they will try anything to destroy it.
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