Economics of Relationships

Ok, a few weeks ago I started thinking about a service to manage relationships that other services could use to make connections within their own system. Nothing new as far as the social networking goes, but the differentiator would be in making the system (and data) open via APIs. I talked to Cory about it and more may be revealed in the future.

Tonight I went over to a friend’s home studio and was asking some questions about marketing music from independent artists. After I left I was thinking about the record label idea I was talking about a while back (allowing people to subscribe to artists they like and receive new music as podcasts).

Long story short is that an open friendship service could allow for new kinds of edge businesses. It could be used by a record label like I mentioned, but it could also be tied in to systems like Flickr. I also think that email marketing will be evolving more to include RSS (notice i am not saying replaced by RSS). The relationship manager could be user to manage those kind of ‘subscriptions’ as well. It would also allow for services that allow you to keep up with what your friends are doing (flickr, blog, del.icio.us, etc) which has novelty for the average user but could have a real business value when thinking about relationships in the email marketing sense.

I think it goes back to the cluetrain stuff of “Markets are conversations” as well as the variation I heard a while back “Conversations are markets”.

Markets are also relationships, and I think it holds that relationships are a market.

Note: sorry for the lack of links. I may come fill those in tomorrow, but I have to get back to work on statzen which is directly related to some of these thoughts