Social Network Escrow Service

This topic is quite extensive but I will keep my comments very brief. I am have much more information about what I write here and I may later include this extra stuff later. If not, feel free to ask me and urge me to continue to share more information about this.

First of all, I will be creating my own social network, possibly with Insoshi or with LovdByLess because they are both based on Ruby on Rails and are therefore easy to extend and modify. I haven’t decided which to go with. I would prefer the one with the most active developers on it. They are both open-source. LovdByLess seems to be further along. Lately, Insoshi has been getting a lot of attention and funding and the founder is the author of RailsSpace, which I first installed on my server and worked great.

After I create my social network, I have the need of allowing my user to sell “stuff” to each other. To safeguard, both sellers and buyers, I would like to integrate an escrow service. During the private messaging between buyers and sellers the details of an order are ironed out, such as pricing, shipping, delivery date, any additional customizations, etc.

After the details are ironed out, the buyer uploads the asking price to the escrow service and the seller sees the funds are now available to start production and/or delivery of the item. The seller know this is a guaranteed purchase because the funds have been allocated for this order alone. The buyer knows this is a guaranteed product because the seller must delivery the product according to the stored private messaging that has occurred prior to the order. Anyway, there are a whole lot of other benefits an escrow service gives, but I won’t get into that here.

What is interesting is that if you read about some trends with Web 2.0, you will see how providing an escrow service to other social networks would be a very lucrative business. My thing is that I am not interesting in developing an escrow service myself, because I do not want to deal with so many regulations concerning the privacy of payment information.