Sergio Lub was doing social networking long before facebook or anything in that ilk in 1997. His network, Friendly Favors, has over 50,000 members, but needs to migrate to a more modern platform if it is progress. Faceboook and the barter networks have a damning deficiency, in his opinion, which is that they fail to capitalise or value trust. Ebay does trust, but ebay isn't actually about relationship building or barter, and the trust is not based on relationship, but only on the trading experience - it is completely impersonal, and no credit is extended. Ebay is a marketplace, not a barter network.
Current members of friendly favours will be migrated to a new web service, which will provide improve trading functionality, similar to a barter network.
Main features of the new service
- The service would start by copying the existing membership of Friendly Favors, and as far as possible, their relationships.
- New members would be invited by existing ones.
- Users should have detailed control over who gets to see various parts of their data.
- Users should maintain their own entries in a directory of offered goods and services, which would include prices in Thankyous, equivalent to 1 dollar for now.
- There would be 4 ways to obtain credit on the system
- Purchase it at the nominal rate. The reciepts would be subject to a holding charge of 1% per month, which would fund the system.
- As a proportion of turnover
- Extended by friends
- As a prioritised loan, extended voluntarily by the vendor at the point of sale.
- Transactions would be subject to a fee of 5% which would fund the system.
- There would be no monthly membership fees or joining costs
Later functionality
- It would be great to have a way for the artist to set up an automatic price reduction every week or month, say 10% discount a month, up to the minimum price they would let it go and when it reaches that minimum then the listing moves to a Bargains Section.
- Wish: It would be good for the potential buyer to set up an automatic purchase order when the price of a product goes below T$XXX (of course an email can be sent to the artist who may agree and approve the transaction right away – the SkyAuction model).
- An online profile for each artist, with picture, bio and link to their site (as in Favors.org).
- An easy feed back procedure (similar to Netflix), to build an online reputation for each artist. The votes will be from customers and they will be collected by sending a request for feedback after a week and then again 2 weeks later if they have not yet voted.
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