Financial institutions and regulators are facing a new wave of synthetic online currencies and financial products that have their genesis in social networks. Speaking about the future of money at the AMP's biennial Amplify "festival of ideas", held in Sydney yesterday, Venessa Miemis, a futurist and digital ethnographer, warned that there was a good chance "Facebook will have a whole economy that they control". Facebook users can already buy credits that can then be exchanged for online goods and services. While these credits are a virtual currency - they can't yet be cashed out - Miemis said they could be used to buy products from corporate Facebook sites. This, she said, could lead to Facebook having enormous economic clout. "At what point will they run into regulation, being in a walled garden they own?" she asked. To-date though, Miemis noted, regulation was trailing the development of social networks. So, it seems, are both the banks and financial institutions. Miemis said banks ought to monitor social networks to see how people were interacting online and the kind of services they were seeking, and then create financial products that better met those needs. She said a top-down approach to financial product development would no longer work. Already there are a number of new financial products and virtual currencies being developed to meet the needs of social networkers. "There is a move away from people trusting big brands... and a move to more of a peer-to-peer community," she said. "I see an explosion of these experimental currencies," she said. She pointed to examples such as the controversial virtual currency Bitcoin, and the metacurrency.org community, which has been established to build an online platform and protocols to allow multiple interoperable currencies to exist on the internet. Miemis also introduced the audience to new financial markets such as Empireavenue, which is attempting to create a market value for individuals on social networks and mash-up sites that links individuals' credit rating with their social network credentials. She acknowledged this was "creepy", but said it represented the kind of information banks might expect to collect themselves shortly. "The future of money isn't money itself," she said. "The underlying zeitgeist of the times is the desire to engage in a meaningful, fun way. Businesses that get this will be successful." Last year, Miemis conducted a survey of Gen-Yers to determine their opinion of banks and financial institutions. She found that many weren't interested in banks, but instead were interested in forming resilient online communities that might be prepared to work within the confines of online barter networks, rather than be constrained by a physical currency. "It is a different mentality," she acknowledged. The concept of money as a coin of the realm suited the capitalistic old world economy. "But retention of intellectual property