Has anyone built TradeBook.com?
August 2, 2010 11:03 AM   Subscribe

Has anyone built a social networking website to facilitate region-to-region and international trade?

Regional and international trade is built around networks of personal relationships, for example those built via trade fairs and trade organizations. Are there any social networking startups (for profit or non-profit) that connect buyers and sellers of goods and services, whether region-to-region or country-to-county?
posted by beagle to Technology (4 answers total)
 
Not exactly, but LinkedIn seems to be one used most commonly by business people.
posted by MechEng at 11:24 AM on August 2, 2010


Not that I'm aware of. This is the sort of social environment which has had a relatively robust set of systems for managing one's social network for, well, forever, really. And Facebook, netizen utopianism notwithstanding, isn't terribly good at fostering the sort of glad-handing relationship you're talking about here.

Furthermore, a lot of these relationships are out of the public view, and this is a feature, not a bug. If you're shopping around for a supplier, you don't necessarily want the people you meet to know who else you're talking to. Likewise, a supplier probably doesn't want his clients to know who his other clients are. A lot of the marginal advantages to be gained from trade exist because of information asymmetry, and throwing the whole thing out there for the world to see would be counter-productive on some level.

So I think the answer is "No, because no one would use it."
posted by valkyryn at 12:04 PM on August 2, 2010


Best answer: Alibaba.com has all sorts of social networking features.
posted by jeb at 1:03 PM on August 2, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks, Alibaba looks somewhat like what I had in mind. Valkyryn makes a good point and Alibaba is not all that transparent, social features notwithstanding.
posted by beagle at 2:13 PM on August 2, 2010


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