In response to: The Financial Reformation

This video is fantastic, it suggest peer-to-peer lending may be just the start, what will be next I wonder? What other financial services can social networking and social media offer? I think there will always be gatekeepers - those with the technical skills to maintain the system that facilitates contact between individuals, but I hope competition will be vibrant and that choice will not be limited to connection via Facebook or Twitter.

At the moment, Facebook and Twitter are great platforms to enable individuals to use a service, but my concern is that this gives too few too much power of access and to which services. However, in the UK, neither of the leading UK peer-to-peer lending services provide access via Facebook or Twitter, partly due to insufficient security for a financial service. Therein is an opportunity for a company to provide access to financial products in the way that Facebook Connect to does for so many other online services, or for Facebook and Twitter to create a massively enhanced country-specific security application approval system.

Such a service would give one company a lot of power, but would enable those with knowledge and funds for not much more than hosting with a secure server to establish an internet-based financial service and therefore would enable a much healthier and vibrant commerical environment allowing for much more competition and choice, and the review services that would follow.

Zero Credit responded and in the comment included a link to the related Wall Street Journal article titled "In the Grip of the Internet Monopolists" to which my response is as follows:

People will always gravitate towards what is safest, it is the instinct for self-preservation. The more people that join something, the more resources and power that something has to make it safer than the rest. It is the same in nature from planetary objects to molecules, they all group together because of safety and strength in numbers. No doubt you have heard "united we stand, divided we fall" and "survival of the fittest".

There does however come a point when they can get too big to the point of having enough power, which to some individuals, results in corruption and consequently insecurity for the masses.

I believe the answer is to make the business of acquisitions and mergers much harder, to prevent forced takeovers, to stop ending services just so as to hire the developers skills.

Recently Facebook purchased drop.io which is the only service in the world with a free low-usage plan that enables people to upload files to a registered users account, Apple offers a similar thing with MobileMe, but there is no free option.

I found the drop.io service essential when an advice-giving organisation with internet access would not permit emailing service users, they used drop.io to upload a document for me rather than printing it saving the space and resources of printing and filing. Now thanks to the ease with which Facebook acquired drop.io, the service will end in a month and that will be it. Every similar service requires registration or payment, both of which a bureaucratic organisation are very unlikely to do.

The result of this acquisition is not just the loss of a useful service, it also means less choice in file management and storage.