Share Your Friends. Guard Your Contacts.

Here's a quick mental exercise. Think of two people. The first should be a good friend - someone who you get together with to watch football, or who you see on the weekends, or who you have a years-long social history with. The second should be an important business contact. Perhaps one of your top clients, or an executive that holds a key to your career.

Now ask yourself: which of these two people (friend, contact, or both) would you be more likely to:

• Introduce to a relative?
• Include on a mass-email?
• Connect with on a social network?
• Talk about on a blog or public forum?
• Ask to join a group going to happy hour?

If you are like most people, you are much more comfortable with friendships being presented in public forums, with people you don't trust, in environments you can't control, than with your business relationships. Partly because of the open, forgiving nature of a friendship... but partly because of the importance that a business relationship can have on your career and livelihood. That's why we protect our business relationships in such a different way than our social relationships.

While we've been building Ticklr I've been paying special attention to this difference. And it fascinates me that the most common web applications out there for managing business relationships are based on socially-oriented behavior.

But I am even more amazed by the trouble people will go through to guard and protect those business relationships - controlling every attribute of the interaction, spending hours in research mode, writing that email over and over and over again so it captures the message just right. If you are good at doing this - kudos to you. So many of us struggle.

At Ticklr we hold your relationships with your business contacts in the highest regard. We'll be rolling out our application in the coming months to more and more people and if there is one thing we want you to trust about us it is that. We respect the relationships you have and aim to do everything we can to improve them. We won't spam your contacts. We won't sell your personal information. We won't share anything you put in Ticklr with anyone. Ever.

I wish I could trust all online applications the same way. And I know that we as a company have to earn that trust from you. That's our goal.