Devangshu Datta: A new confidential agent

VIEWPOINT

Boy meets girl. One feels an attraction but doesn't know if it's reciprocated. Should he/she risk declaring his/her feelings? If the feelings are reciprocated, fine. If not, he/she would be open to rejection, with all the attendant humiliation.

On Animal Planet, the stars use set-pieces in this scenario. Felines yowl, canines expose their "shocking" parts, peacocks strut and penguins offer pebbles. Rejection is a statistical possibility rather than a social disaster, so it isn't a big deal.

Human mating rituals are more complex. In chick-lit, the signalling starts with the heroine confiding the attraction to a common friend in the hope she will arrange a connection. The novels usually crank up with the friend turning out to be an "unfriend".

Wouldn't it be nice to signal the attraction without having to declare it explicitly? That way, the signaller could wait for the other party to make the first move. Of course, if both parties are attracted but fail to send/decode signals, it leads to a game situation. Each has a positive payoff from waiting for the other to make the first move. So they both wait forever. Great novels like Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day deal with that.

Orkut has designed a neat feature that replaces the common friend. It's called "Crush" and it creates a market in matching concealed intentions. On Orkut, if you fancy somebody, you confide in Crush. Your attraction is secret. It is only revealed if the object of your crush also tells Orkut that he or she is attracted to you. Then both parties are informed.

Orkut is a reprehensible, immoral place. It allows kids to talk about penguins carrying pebbles. It allows people to confess that they hate India, the US, Samoa, etc. Crush is poly-amorous and gender-neutral. You can register your secret attraction for many people of assorted sexes without leaving the closet.

Reprehensible or not, this could be a powerful tool in certain markets. Adults working in meatspace are just waking up to the possibilities of this social networking feature. In a discussion I read on the personal blog of one of the world's best CIOs, a media-planner outlined a common situation where Crush might help.

An ad falls through at the last moment. The media host scrambles to find a replacement ad, offering huge discounts. What if "replacement advertisers" could each bid the rate at which they were prepared to place last-minute ads? Those bids would be accessed by a media host only if its primary advertisers cancelled. The media industry would see a major drop in stress levels and the market for discounted ads would clear.

It may work in high-level headhunting also. A CEO or CIO is reluctant to place his CV on an open site like Naukri.com for fear that his current employer will get wind of it. The meatspace headhunter is the "common friend". Suppose instead that a high-level exec could list alternative employers of choice on a closed site? These would only be revealed if one of those specific employers made a specific request to hire him, perhaps after putting down a substantial surety.

Crush might work as a disintermediating tool in mergers as well. Company A is on the lookout to buy company B. But it doesn't want a hostile takeover. How does it signal this without the market going berserk? The predator may place a concealed bid, which is revealed only if the prey also states that it's open to being taken over.

I can think of other possibilities that could transform various tendering and auction processes. There are hurdles and variations in each case. But I suspect that there would be intelligent solutions to these. And, given the rate of penetration of social networking, there will soon be generic acceptance of such mechanisms. If this happens, Orkut and its peers may end up changing the marketplace in ways they never imagined.