I have had a lot of time to contemplate why it failed and it's become a tradition to share these thoughts, so here goes...

First of all, I always knew this project was a long shot. I'm trying to reinvent the very heart of society. Not only is this a ridiculously (some would say insanely) hard thing to do, but the seemingly impossible nature of it turns people away. People don't invest in ideas that they can't fairly effortlessly comprehend and lets face it, non equilibrium thermodynamics and chaos theory are not exactly breakfast reading for most people.

I also made a sequence of mistakes that didn't help. Primarily I didn't get myself out there enough. I should have written more and sooner. I needed a partner on board from the beginning who was passionate about the idea and was good at communicating it to the world. I also focused so much on architecture and theory that I didn't spend as much time as I should on presentation. Whilst I understand UI having a designer would have really helped to sell the idea. Which brings me to the next problem.

I had time but I didn't have any capital. I entered this project thinking that since I had managed to engineer my life so that I had time to explore this idea, surely there must be other people who could too. I talked to a lot of people over the years who were interested in helping with what I was doing, but none had the sort of free time that was needed to get the project to a state where it would be financially viable.

Finally I needed more engineers. The scope of the project was just too large for one person. Web technology developed at a quicker pace than I could keep pace with whilst trying to develop such an all encompassing project.

If I was to start over, I would start much smaller, take one use case and develop an open self regulating social network for that. Maybe one day I will have the opportunity to do that. When I started this project I had read enough and had the right experience to see a possibility of a new way for us to organise ourselves. At the time I was enthusiastic, but far from clear about how to do it. Despite the failure of Babbling Brook, I am now strangely much more confident. I have a far clearer understanding of the forces in play and if the opportunity arises I think I would have a much better chance of succeeding now than I did then.

The web moves fast and the code is now out of date. Some of the central ideas would be much easier to develop with modern techniques. Nevertheless, I'll leave the sites up for a while and if you have questions or ideas of your own you’d like to discuss then please get in touch. Meanwhile I have a family to feed and a free market to engage with.

The idea is still very close to my heart and maybe one day I'll be in a position to do something new in the same direction. But for now, Au revoir.

If you scroll down to the comments you will see a common criticism of this idea that I want to address.

“Great, an economy based on Facebook likes and twitter cred.”

The comment is meant ironicly, but it raises an important point. Do we really want a society based of something as shallow as that?

My response to this kind of criticism is that a society that uses social networking to exchange value will look very different from the social networks of today.

A tweet costs a user very little. It has very little real value and this makes it easy for the shallow and fickle to thrive. But what if every comment effected your salary? I don't think twitter comments would be so shallow then.

Having your salary effected by a comment on twitter also sounds like a bad idea, but perhaps it is possible to have something in between. Perhaps together we can find that balance. This is what Babbling Brook is designed to do. It lets us decide where the balance lies. It lets us choose what is important and what is not.

It does this by putting the power of the networks algorithms into our hands. It lets us decide how we judge each other.

The aspect of Babbling Brook that is hardest to explain is its open ended nature. Babbling Brook is not simply a new economic system that is more efficient than the free market. It is a new platform on top of which many different economic system can be built. It is perfectly possible to build a free market democracy using it, but it is also possible to build any other system that uses numbers to place value on things. In using analogies to explain how Babbling Brook works I am selling it short. It's not that the analogies are wrong, it is just that they are limited.

All economic systems essentially describe how people interact together to create a society and the technology that is used to do that informs what kind of society can be created. In other words an economic system can only use mechanisms for exchanging value that technology permits. The invention of money provided some very interesting properties, e.g. it made it possible to store a lot of value in a small token. However it also has limitations, such as making it impossible to track the morals associated with work done to create the value.

The interesting thing about the internet is that it makes it possible to exchange value in any way that can be mathematically modelled. This is not possible with money, which is much more limited. The internet makes it possible for society to organise in a multitude of new ways and rather than tightly define a single new method of doing that I have designed Babbling Brook to make it easy for many new methods to arise.

For example, Babbling Brook makes it possible to build a system in which every transaction ever made is public, but it is also possible to make transactions that are private. How much each is used will ultimately be decided by the people using the system. For example, public transactions make it possible to track the morals of work done. Private transactions allow people to obtain things that society considers ok but at the same time can cause problems for the purchaser, such as buying medication.

The downfall of the abstractness of Babbling Brook is that is that it is a harder sell. There is less to immediately grab hold of. The purpose of this intermission is essentially to point out that the examples I give in the following posts are all only part of a larger picture. When I talk about the benefits of something like tracking transactions it is not without being aware of the problems this might also cause. Babbling Brook is designed to let the people using it find the balance between how much is public and how much is private.

In the next post we will get back on track with a post about how you earn credit in Babbling Brook, and how you get stuff for it. (I've also had a request for more curry analogies, I hope you like Thai?)

We value things more when they are hard to obtain. For example, a poster of a famous painting is not very valuable, say £15, but the original can be worth a small fortune, such as Cezanne's Card Players which recently exchanged hands for more than 259 million dollars.

Money being a finite resource is what makes it valuable. It was originally made from gold and silver coins and each coin reflected the value of the metal in the coin. But why is gold valuable? Sure it is a pretty yellow colour, but I think I would rather have a house than a few kilograms of shiny gold. The reason is that gold is rare, which enables it to be used as a place holder for other items that are genuinely valuable.

We don't use gold as money any more, instead we place our trust in the government to set the limit on the amount of money that there is, but the principle is still the same. The value of money represents how hard it is to obtain the stuff we buy.

The rarity of money enables it to act as a kind of social glue that keeps us all connected with each other. We use it as a form of communication to indicate to each other how much we value items, allowing us to negotiate on mass how much any item is worth. The general consensus is that onions are worth about 50p a kilo at the moment. This price is worked out in small steps, starting with a base cost to the farmer to produce them and for shops to supply them. This price is then changed depending on how in demand they are. If there is more demand for onions than shops have available, then the price rises so that the shops and farmers can make as much money from the onions as they are able to. If there is not enough demand then the price is lowered so that they can be sold before they go off.

Social networks do not have a mechanism that enables 'likes' to be a finite resource that is traded, but there is no reason they cannot. The simplest way would be for the owners of the social network to act like a central bank and limit the number of 'likes' available and then allow them to be swapped when a user 'likes' something. The reason this is not done is because the value of a 'like' is more profitable to the social network if they are free – it helps them to identify the most 'liked' posts, which in turn helps them with making money from adverts.

Babbling Brook does introduce an optional mechanism to enable 'likes' to be traded, but it does not act like a central bank. The vision behind Babbling Brook is not to just create a copy of the free market in a social networking site, but to create an entirely new form of economic system. One that can solve some of the most difficult problems that society faces, such as global warming and inequality. The next post will explore the open ended nature of Babbling Brook.

The answer is that you paid for it without realising. Let's use Facebook as an example. I've taken a picture of some beautiful onions that I am going to make into curry and posted it on Facebook. You load up Facebook and see the post and at the same time you glance at an advert to the side of the post. Bazzam, money has changed hands. I didn't receive any money but Facebook did. I am being paid with services in kind. Instead of money I get the opportunity to see a video post you make of your kids eating a chocolate bar - or rather smearing it everywhere.

Let's do another example. You are reading this blog post yet there are no adverts. How am I getting paid for the service of writing this blog? I'm doing it in the hope that you will tell your friends about Babbling Brook. I need to get the attention of as many people as possible before I launch a crowd funding campaign so that I can buy more onions to feed me whilst I work on Babbling Brook. I am being paid in eyeballs. Urrrk, I'd rather have chocolate.

The point of this post is that we do pay for the social media that we consume, we just don't use money to do so. Babbling Brook takes this process to the next level, making it possible to exchange resources as well as just posts, tweets and images. We'll look at how it does that shortly, but first, the next post will look at the second difference between a monetary transaction and a social media one - value is assigned after the transaction rather than before.

Lets switch gears now and look at a social network. I love onions so much (have you noticed?) that I've written a blog post about making an authentic British Indian takeaway curry – should the onion paste be made from liquidised onions or finely chopped? It turns out that this is a hot topic and fifty five people have 'liked' my post.

On the surface these activities seem different but they actually follow a similar pattern. Value has been assigned to the blog post in a very similar manner as to how I paid for the onions. Both situations involve a producer providing something – onions or a blog post. Then a value is given to it that reflects how much it is worth. However, there are three important differences. Firstly, anyone could read the blog post without giving something in return. Secondly, a value has been assigned after consumption of the blog post. Finally, you only have a limited amount of money but you can make as many likes as you want without cost to yourself.

We will look at these three points in the next few posts.

There we have it, an economic system. Economics does not have to be complicated.

This kind of economic system is what most people image people used way back in the dawn of time when we used fingers to count instead of computers. Unfortunately it's not actually true. This kind of swapping has always gone on but it has never been common, due a problem called the coincidence of wants. It is generally unlikely that when you have spare onions that I will have spare chocolate. Never the less, in this instance it's your lucky day (Hmm, shall I make a rogan josh, or maybe a bhuna).

You have some onions. Lets say one kilogram. I have a cupboard full of chocolate, but there is no way I am giving you all of it. Tell you what, I'll give you 100 grams of chocolate for your onions, is that fair? No? You want 200 grams. Lets settle on 150.

What we are doing here is finding a comparative value for our goods. We are not using money, but we are using numbers to decide how much to exchange. We could just eye it up and come to an agreement, but we would still be doing the same thing, just without formalising the quantities. We have assigned a value to something we have and something we want and used that to exchange resources.

The economic transaction described here is very primitive and limited. We have since developed a rich history of different methods to exchange resources. I'll be examining them in detail at a later date as they provide a lot of insight into what causes humans to organise, but the next post is going to sprint to modern times and look at the similarity between purchasing curry ingredients and making a blog post about making curry.

Here is the shortest possible, but rather opaque way to explain why it is possible for a social network to develop into an economic system : Both use numbers to indicate value. For example, a tomato might be worth 20 pence and a blog post might have been 'liked' 20 times.

That's it, job done. If you can hand in your 20 pence’s, then I can wrap this blog up. Ok, so it's not really that simple and obtuse. In the next few posts I'll go into a bit more depth and look at some of the ways in which Babbling Brook is both a social network and an economic system.

This blog will start in earnest next week, exploring the topics in the introduction in a lot more detail.

I'll also be starting a second blog soon, called the Journal, which will be a place for me to explore the development process and also to write opinion pieces about current events.

More soon...