Cheers.

Everyone wants a "Cheers" bar in their neighbourhood, filled with their closest friends and colleagues, to talk about the day's events, make plans over a drink and maybe meet new people. For a lot of people nowadays, Facebook is that place, without the beers, pool tables and Sam Malone behind the bar. So it's interesting when a new social commerce site comes along talking in the same vein. Copious is a new online selling site with a couple of big differences to the eBay style sites, the most important being you have to be a real person with a Facebook profile and not just "seller69" or "Xanadugirl@glitschmail".

Copious is a site where "everyone knows your name" because the only way you can log onto the site is with your Facebook identity. The past decade has been highlighted by anonymous buyers and sellers relying on feedback that no one really believed, on sites like eBay, Craigslist and even Amazon. So now we are coming out of the closets and phone booths in the case of Superman, to reaffirm our true identity, to buy and sell with the integrity of our name attached.

It's the first wave of social commerce sites to address some of the anxieties of the past, like handing over your money to complete strangers who never had to reveal themselves. This is a major shift and could increase the number of people buying online, who have been waiting on the side lines because of the trust anxieties. They were built up over years of face to face buying and selling which until now could not be replicated on the web. The anonymity of the first wave of online commerce is giving way to the openness of Facebook which is being used to address the ability to buy and sell with more comfort.

So Copious is looking, via your required Facebook log on, to reassure people, they really are dealing with a person and not a company or a scurrilous individual and as co founder Jonathan Ehrlich likes to call it "authentic identity". Your selling identity on Copious is no longer linked to how much you sell, how quickly you deliver or what your feedback screen looks like but centres round your social interactions with your clients and their perceptions of service and product delivery. All taking place in the wide open spaces of Facebook, where no one can hide behind monikers and badly spelled addresses.

So real conversations can be had, information and reviews on products will be held in the open and you never know, you may even add to your "Friend List". Sellers can even decide to give discounts to their most loyal customers, especially if they are seen recommending products.

So has web commerce finally come the full circle to a destination where buyers and sellers cohabitate in the comfort of knowing who they are dealing with? Is this what we had in mind when we talked about the global market place? Where everyone really did know your name.