The game is changing rapidly. Recently read the book from David Kirkpatrick on The Facebook effect. An interesting piece of work on the rise of Facebook, but more importanly on the social implications of Facebook. The fact that we are now all connected and know how to find each other. Recently I became friends with one of my former classroom mates from junior school (from 6 till 12 years old). My lady friend is now living in America and frequently updates photo’s. On the recent ones, it showed her father, who used and still lives above the store of my parents (they unfortunately don’t live anymore). But by seeing the pictures of this man, it brought back my childhood memories of living in Utrecht and spending a lot of time in my parents shop.

It made my world really small, but more important, it gave me a true quality moment, a moment to reflect back on where I came from, my values in life.

Put that in reflection on the current currency crisis. First Greece and Europe and since las week also the United States in distress. In a newspaper it was already declared that globalisation was coming to an end with all this stuff going on.

Question is whether this is true.I think the Facebook example shows that people, not economies are already fully adapted to a true global community. We just need to figure out what kind of economics go along with that. The current economies all are based on their current currencies, but what happens if we are going to have different currencies. In the netherlands we already created a sub economy with our local “markplaats” site, the Dutch version of eBay. With the high density of the netherlands, people find it easy to travel and pick their stuff at the house of the former owner of the goods. We are becoming a trading nation once again.

This is also reflects back to the virtual money we are trading on electronic games we find amongst others on Facebook. Social games, where we think it is normal to buy goods for.

The coming years we will integrate payments with our mobile phones and the trust in virtual money will increase. Then the Global Social Community we are today, will perhaps become the Global Social Economy.

The game has changed. Don’t be fooled on the distraction we are currently facing. No change happens without disruption !

Frank Wammes