I wonder if this can be exploited for business networking purposes. Simply choose a person in your "network" and ask them to introduce you to one other person they know and repeat with the new person.
Why not online matchmaking / dating? Not being in that market I have no idea if this already exists, if not it sounds like a great idea for a startup. Or if it already crashed and burned that would be interesting to hear about.
So ... guys ... I have this unattached sister in law, kinda athletic, professionally employed, owns her own house, she is about as much of a PITA as her sister, aka my wife, so if I can put up with my wife you should be able to tolerate her little sister ...
From historical experience my attempts setting up blind dates between my SiL and guys I know, have all gotten shot down by my wife, aka her sister, with what summarizes to "WTF were you thinking". Assuming a similarity between matchmaking and business relationships, this might indicate issues with peer to peer connection building. At least a meta-moderation facility is likely needed.
Also if A sets up a hot date or business lunch between mutual friends B and C I could conceivably lose both B and C as friends if they hate each other. So in a game theory perspective the guy who does the least matchmaking comes out furthest ahead, right? But the purpose of the site was to do matchmaking, at least in theory and in PR. Although the real purpose would be to sell subscriptions and ads. I think I'm seeing another problem here.
You have a limited number of "waste your more important contact's time" tokens. You get more when you successfully introduce someone who is useful to your higher-status contact,
The odd thing is, even in an unsuccessful match, where you introduce two people and they don't establish a relationship they both find pleasant, if you connect a lower-status contact with the higher-status contact, even if the match is unsuccessful, you are still seen to have done your lower-status contact a favor, even though you have annoyed the higher status contact, so if the lower-status contact is someone you want to curry favor with, it might make sense to introduce them even if there is a lower probability of them forming a mutually profitable relationship with the higher-status contact, but normally it's a matter of "how interesting is the potential relationship between the two people I am introducing," which takes some thought and often times means not making the introduction.
The upshot here is that I'm not going to just right out introduce two of my contacts. I mean, I will if I think they can have a beneficial relationship, but I generally feel pretty weird when someone directly asks me for an intro to another specific person, rather than 'Hey, do you know anyone who is good with X" - because with the latter, I can talk to each person individually, and I can silently drop the whole thing without telling the other they were rejected, whereas if X asks me to introduce them to Y, and either Y says they are not interested or I think I would annoy Y, then I've gotta reject X, which can be awkward.
no?
with what is said above, it would seem to suggest that after enough people, the person you are introduced to is irrelevant to the first person who started introducing you to people.