Trade A Favor is the first product from a group of people committed to leveraging social technologies in the service of global change. It is founded on the simple premise that the social graph’s global reach and contextualized connections will reduce the economic frictions that have made bartering less efficient than printed money since the Babylonians.
Trade A Favor is not ‘fighting’ the cash economy. Money is not going anywhere, and it needn’t. We envision a global, socially-based barter economy coexisting with the cash economy, everyone free to engage with the unique features and rewards of each.
The TAF Equation told the story on our home page at launch.
What we believe is that money is a useful tool, and tools are supposed to make life better. A life enslaved rather than enriched by the cash economy is a life that has allowed the tool to take over, and that’s never good. That means it’s time to build new tools.
When we started Trade A Favor, it symbolized our belief in the power of social technologies to restore balance to a global economy that increasingly dehumanizes everyone—from the dispossessed to the megarich—by separating us from each other and the consequences of our actions.
That was 2007. Back then we made the strategic decision to build the prototype as an application for the new Facebook platform. Few adults we knew outside our field were even on Facebook at the time. We had to explain to our friends and families what it was, why they needed to be on it, and why we weren’t launching on our own domain. “It’s a social application,” we kept saying, “and it needs a social network to run on.”
A slide from our 2007 deck pitching social circles as trading circles.
2007! Light years ago. Before Facebook had fully revolutionized the way we connect online. Before Twitter perfected the open message exchange. Before Foursquare showed us how to do localization. Before the global social uprisings that used all of these interim developments and more to prove our essential point: A social web, kept free of censorship and available to all, will lead to social change. And that includes economic change.
We believe the social productivity revolution is coming now in the evolution of the social graph. Now we have the tools to build the powerful mobile and web-based applications that will allow us to trade with everyone using our location and our existing online connections. Now we have those connections defined, not just through Facebook but through Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. All giving us unprecedented power to select among our online networks for appropriate, trustworthy trading partners.
It’s time to build Trade A Favor. Please join us.
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