If you’re interested in marketing and commercial uses of social software networks, or if you’re concerned about social software in general, you’ll be interested in this post on the weblog ReadWriteWeb which describes Campari’s recent campaign. They combined a soft-porn with a James Bond kind of feel to it “hotel” website where you can “peek” at sexy “Red Passion” (who always holds a bottle of Campari) with profiles for Red Passion at Flickr and Myspace. (Flickr terminated the account after some discussion.) They’ve closed most of the content at the “Hotel Campari” website now (and what’s left doesn’t make me particularly want to buy Campari – it’s pretty exclusively aimed at a male heterosexual audience from the look of it, and anyway, I don’t much like the taste of the stuff) but it appears to very much be attempting to set up an appealing character. And perhaps some of the appeal of social networks is actually that you can enact simplified versions of relationships with people you don’t really know. The ties and connections of Flickr or Myspace can equally be used to support strong existing ties and to say something about barely-existing ties.