Whoa...now there's a revolutionary idea just itching to build a business design for social nets...economic perfection.
So good, in fact, if I was running Myspace/LinkedIn/Friendster/Orkut/etc, I would have a team hurling this into beta like yesterday.
Oh yah - don't worry abt Facebook. I don't think it's in their DNA to do something this good/not evil, etc, if you've been following the analysis for the last month or so...
Hey Umair, I've been working on this for about 2 years now. We're running in private alpha. We roll into beta early next year. It's hacking advertising into a person-to-person recommendation network.
I was just talking with the guys at www.loudervoice.com during the week, and they are very much into this way of doing things. Expect a fb release soon. HOWEVER: one of the things that might be interesting is if fb pushed recommendations from both strong and weak relationships to you, based on your conversations you were in. The mini-feed is not really "optional" yet it is undoubtedly powerful. You can tweak it, but it isn't "plastic/liquid" (maybe it should be!). For a lot of users out there, some push elements have value.
