It's Rishi

Whether you realize it or not, the interactions you have with other people and businesses are a big part of your identity. Every interaction you have says something about who you are. If you kept a journal that summarized every interaction you’ve ever had, that journal would paint an accurate picture of yourself.

Of course, no one actually writes down summaries of interactions they have. However, while you may not actually write anything down, you are likely to record in your head a little memory of the experience i.e. “My barber John kicks ass. Another bitchin’ haircut!” or “WTF, the drive-thru guy seriously doesn’t understand a word of English. I’m never going back! “. Those memories of your experiences usually just remain in your own head. You might share your experiences with friends and family, but that’s about it. As a result, you, and maybe your friends, know that your barber John rocks, but at the same time there’s many more people in your community that are either in search of a good barber or are walking into John’s barber shop with no clue of what to expect.

So what’s a solution? The (now) obvious answer is to rely on members of the community to publicly share their experiences with one another. I can read about the experiences of others who have interacted with this person/business. Generally speaking, this additional information will help me determine whether I want to interact with this person/business.

Okay, so blah blah, what I just described is simply the concept of what we now know to be a community feedback system. Far and away the largest, most mainstream feedback system belongs to eBay. eBay’s feedback system works well because it is a very tight system. Each user on the system is required to validate their identity and each feedback entry is linked to an eBay transaction. Because of these two requirements, it’s relatively difficult to game their system.

People networking sites from social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace to career networking sites like LinkedIn are founded on this principle of exposing one’s identity and reputation for a possible gain. Users of LinkedIn are encouraged to thoroughly describe their backgrounds and solicit endorsements from past colleagues to bolster their professional reputations. The same thing happens on social networking sites. In both cases, your profile page is your reputation so users naturally want to pad it as much as they can. The problem with these sites is that they are much easier to game. There is no concept of identity verification and one can easily fabricate a profile. Nevertheless, networking sites continue to grow rapidly in popularity and will likely be a force to be reckoned with in the identity/reputation space.

For quite some time I’ve been thinking about the implications of reputation on both personal and business interactions in the Internet of the future. One of the most intriguing topics around reputation is privacy. Of course, I want to use my reputation when it can help me get what I want. For example, I’m generally protective of my credit history, but when applying for a loan, I’m more than happy to divulge this information to help me obtain better loan terms. Similarly, even as recently as a decade ago, one’s resume was considered to be a fairly private document. Nowdays, many people make their resumes publicly accessible on the Web in hopes of landing an even better career opportunity.

Right now, fragments of your reputation are spread all across the Internet on different sites. It’s all but impossible for anyone to assemble those fragments to get a complete view. Let’s say you have a a couple eBay transactions gone bad. What if a bank saw that and rejected your loan application because of it? Sounds kinda farfetched but is it really that crazy? After all, your eBay feedback represents real transactions that you were involved in. So, really, we want to utilize our good reputation when it will help us but mask any negative reputation when it might hurt us.

And that is precisely where things get complicated. First of all, how should reputation be applied? What are its boundaries? How can your reputation in one space be applied to another space? Does it make sense? Who gets to decide? As it is now, most reputation systems are closed systems so for now there is no cross referencing. I can have a horrible reputation on a dating site and no one outside of that dating site will ever know.

One site that’s trying to knock down those boundaries is RapLeaf. They’ve built an open community system. Any site in which the users exchange feedback can integrate with RapLeaf. Initially, they’re focusing their attention on the classifieds and bartering space. Basically every site but eBay. There certainly is value in bringing together reputations from many different communities into a single place. If your reputation is stellar across all the communities, then this is a big win for you. However, if you have some holes in your reputation, now they will be visible across many communities. RapLeaf’s mantra is “it’s more profitable to be ethical”. While this mantra makes sense in the context of transactions, the idea of being “ethical” does not always make sense in other contexts.

The bottom line is that within every community, no matter how small or large, that we belong to, we have a reputation. The Internet is slowly revolutionizing how that reputation can be used for and against us.

Hmm.. this post didn’t really come together as much as I wanted too. There’s still some more points that I wanted to cover like universal/portable identities but this post is already too long and disjointed so I’ll stop now…