we’re big fans of opinionated software, one of those little touches which we think will make interaction within Lemontree a little bit more opinionated is designing the form of reciprocity.

virtual gift giving can be  astonishingly mindless, you pick a gift it to a bulk of users, using a currency of some form to facilitate it. This is horribly spammy really!

In Lemontree the way we’ve envisaged gift giving is this, we’ve considered recommending something to someone as being a gift and we weighted it in the following way:

Where you recommend an item in the library to someone, the person you recommend it to gets 5 points, but if they decide to thank you, get 10 points back. 

It’ll be interesting to see the dynamics that will emerge from this simple designed interaction point. Will lemontree users see this as a form of bartering? will they withhold thanking someone so they don’t develop a lead in the leaderboard? or will they see the interaction as a nice selfless reciprocal exchange that they themselves will think about and propogate?