Social Networking

Social networking can now be used to make business decisions. In the article "Carnegie Mellon students to exploit social networks to predict success of Internet startups," By Bob Brown, students used social networking to predict the success of start ups. This is good because now venture capitalist firms can use this method to help make decisions when deciding which start ups to fund or not. Not only would it help venture capitalist firms invest in start ups, it would also help small time investors. There can be websites now where individual investors join to talk about new start ups and whether to invest in them or not. There is a good side to all this but unfortunately there is also a dark side. According to an article titled " Can you trust crowd wisdom?" by Kristina Grifantini, it turns out that some people skew reviews by reviewing many times. Now it might not sound too bad when reviewing products, but if they do the same with investment options it can really impact the investors since investors invest a lot of money based on the reviews. If an investor decides to invest in a start up company because he saw that 1000 other individuals invested in it, but it turns out that out of the 1000 investors 600 of it are from the same people then his or her thinking would be different and the investment decision maybe different. There is a good and a bad in these technologies but there is no doubt that these technologies will surely continue to evolve in the future. I think that what would be great in the future in social networking with investments, would be the inclusion of artificial intelligence when making investment decisions. There can be a social networking website where individuals come together to talk about start ups and there can also be ai's involved with different personality to make decisions. That would be awesome. 

1. Carnegie Mellon students to exploit social networks to predict success of Internet startups By Bob Brown, NetworkWorld Newsletters, 03/23/10 . Available athttp://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58866?source=NWWNLE_nlt_web_apps_2010-03-24
2. Can you trust crowd wisdom? by Kristina Grifantini, MIT Technology Review, Sept 16, 2009. Available at:http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23477/?a=f