Earlier this week, the New Yorker asked people to Like them on Facebook, in exchange for access to an exclusive article by Jonathan Franzen.

It seems that social sharing is a form of currency. Pay by reference, citation or backlink. Perhaps pay even less depending on your influence scores. I wonder, is this model only relevant for media/tech sorts. Or can it work for real people too? 

Either way, thinking this way is useful when asking people to use a product or service. It's what Rockmelt did successfully when they launched their social browser. Other platforms (typically new web business launches) are inviting users to tweet / post, in exchange for quicker access to invite-only betas. If something is valuable enough, I might choose to invest some social currency in it. So why not ask me to spend some of it?

The New Yorker piece itself was excellent (if too long to read on Facebook; I printed it). It was about the death of the talented and doomed David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, and how Franzen dealt with it, as his friend. You can read it at http://t.co/IPwCgfe.