The business relationship! 50, 20, or even 10 years ago it would seem ludicrous to do business without establishing a solid foundation of this somewhat touchy and indefinable understanding between two parties that both of them are there to suck every ounce of possible profit from the other. In the normal world, relationships are built upon caring, giving, and understanding. Why have we tried to force these same principles into a forum where they are not necessarily needed? You don’t need to be funny, kind or enjoyable; I don’t even have to like you. As long as you demonstrate to me that you provide me with some kind of value that I cannot find elsewhere, the relationship will be just fine.

And with this feeling comes the true value of these social business networking sites like LinkedIn, Ryze, and Tribe. They strip away all the unnecessary chit chat and tiptoeing that goes along with the normal ice breakers that arise during your first blind meeting with someone. Soon I will be able to walk into a meeting, already knowing all the necessary background information about this person. Through discussion with other networkers, I will already know if he is honest, shady, caring, giving, thieving, or backstabbing. And with that, is lunch even needed.

With the rise of Skype and other video messengers, the personal meetings that used to take up time and effort are now being streamlined into a forum where I don’t even need to leave my house. Just last night I had a 3 way skype meeting where I was in my dorm room, one person was in Cranberry, and the third party was in China. Yes China. Without these geographical limitations, the efficiency, simplicity, and quantity of my business meetings are endless. The networking sites of the future will be the ones that can best link all these together.

A few summers ago, a friend and I were scouring a local yard sale for sweet deals. Well not really, it was more of a way to pass our boredom. On what seemed like our 1000th searched box, we finally came across something interesting. It was an Atari 2600 game system with about 40 games. For 5 bucks we couldn’t go wrong. We brought it back to my house, hooked it up, and played nonstop until we got sick of the glitchy controls and bad graphics… about 9 minutes later.
Not wanting this contraption to confine my already limited desk space, we decided to put up a quick ebaY listing. 7 days and 128 dollars later, I was packing my Atari into a box headed for Wichita. Who would ever think that that dusty chunk of plastic would be worth so much? This got me thinking back to my first ebaY experience…

I was in the market for a new motorcycle. My tireless searching for the perfect Yamaha R6 lead me to 4 bikes in the area. All were priced dead on with the Kelley blue book price (the leading authority on used vehicle values). Before picking the eventual winner, I thought I should do a quick search on ebaY. A few hours later, my graph of online R6 sales suggested to me that the bikes sold online were going for 500-600 dollars less than the blue book value. Was the blue book wrong? Does ebaY offer a better representation of the true value of an object? After printing out recent sale prices, I eventually talked a seller down 400 dollars because of the ebaY pricing.

Classic Car values are determined by their median selling prices at recent car auctions, same with rare coins. The model of ebaY, the ability to extend a medium for exchange to all points of the globe, has broken down the geographical limitations of pricing. No longer is a snow mobile worthless in Florida, or a Jetski worthless in Alaska.

The ability to extend the market of even the most random objects to the few people in the world that hold that object at a higher value, gives the most accurate system of pricing in the world. The day the XBOX 360 was introduced, they were being sold on ebaY for 4 times their retail value. Which is the more accurate value, the retail price from walmart or the bid price on ebaY? Only when a product is easily available to all, can the invisible hand of the law of supply and demand truly reach its potential.