As noted by CNET News, social networking portal Tickle has begun to charge for access to people who have distant degrees of separation in their personal social networks, while allowing the rest of the online dating and socialization service to retain free acces and use. This is an intriguing approach to monetizing social content, one that has done an excellent job to targeting the highest value that people would like to have from such a service. By contrast, LinkedIn requires one to go get referrals through the degrees-of-separation intermediaries who know these people. LinkedIn probably has a better model for ensuring a sense of a quality set of relationships, and that's important in the beginning for a service that's developing business contacts as content. But once those networks are in place and fairly robust, identifying the key point of value to participants for monetization is an excellent point to consider, in contrast to the "bar the door" approach that many online content services assume as best practices. Each social contact is a transaction of sorts, and being able to monetize content on a transaction basis is they key to many online content models.