Sessions Top Ten Insights - Six Reputations Are Not Portable
There was a lot of talk at Sessions about trust. The word appears 33 times in the transcript. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it 11 times himself. Here, Jeff makes the point that value is shifting from content to trust.
“And so the content isn't what's valuable. It's the trust and relationship that's valuable, and that to me, in a post scarcity -- what the internet does is it takes away scarcity in terms of both content and distribution, and it changes the value essentially to trust. So the friction is still there. The friction isn't "I own the content and you don't." The friction is, "You're going to keep good content? Okay, then let's talk." It's a different friction, a different value, but that's essentially what we're going towards…..So relationships and trust becomes a new structure.
This led to a discussion of how trust is created on the web, which in turn led to a discussion about eBay’s rating systems one of the largest and most successful systems created to engender trust on the web. If value is shifting to trust then a generalized reputation system could theoretically become the organizing principle behind a large and diverse set of web services. But, Mary Hodder squelched this thread with an important insight about reputations – they are not portable.
“you can pull data for reputation from Ebay.... but the thing about the difference between what Tim was talking about, maps, and Ebay's reputation information is that the mapping data makes sense when you pull it out of the system, whereas the reputation data, because Ebay is so skewed, it's such a bizarre social environment, everybody is under tremendous pressure to make this sort of, you know, A+++ best sale I've ever had, which, I mean, would only exist if the guy who was selling you the thing drove me the item from Kansas or something, otherwise it's just probably B+. [So]... the reputation information is perfect or it's terrible, and when you pull it out of that system ... it doesn't match up. It doesn't translate with other walled garden reputations”
It turns out that every web service defines trust differently, uses it differently and polices it differently, so it may be difficult if not impossible to create a reputation system that is both general and useful.
November 9, 2005 05:20 PM, By Brad Burnham
Tags: reputation sessionstopten trust
Comments (12)
Very good point about lack of portability of reputation in this case. However, SOME reputation systems are portable. I would say there are two examples of this:
1) A trust system, lets say based on FOAF or an enhanced myspace/friendster/linkedin/orkut/whathaveyou friend-map (the latter would have to be enhanced with "values" assigned to each link in the map so that you can have "good" friends and "relatives" and "best" friends, etc - think back to how sixdegrees.com use to do it). This kind of trust system would most likely be the same across any kind of service like this, and could be used to figure out how many people "vouch" for somebody else, thus being a measure of trust. You could even extend this further and set up a system that takes this map and does a pagerank sort of calculation on it so that a person's input to somebody else's trust is based not only on the value assigned to that link, but also on the assigning person's "TrustRank". That way you could culll all the fake accounts that nobody else trusts and concentrate on valuing the trust of real people.
2) The second case when reputation is portable is across the same sort of applications. In other words, eBay reputation is portable to other auction sites. It might even be portable to other ecommerce sites in general. Its certainly portable to Paypal - in fact, I think Paypal uses the eBay trust system for certain things (i think it shows the number of successful transactions a person has participated in or something like that). Also, if you have a blog trust system (lets say the livejournal friend-of system, or the slashdot friend/foe system), you could certainly apply that to other blogs with at least some success.
I think you're right about content being both an input and and output to trust. If somebody produces good content, they are more trusted - and if they are trusted then you value their content more.
Posted by Ivan Tumanov , November 10, 2005 11:03 AM
A small company called Opinity is trying to address this issue by aggregating many different sources of reputation data (ie. eBay rating, credit rating, etc.) to enable sites to interact w/individuals to get the reputation item they need for that trusted interaction to take place. It will be interesting to see if they manage to pull this off but I'm afraid that they may have a "chicken and the egg" problem in getting people using the service in order to get sites to support it and w/no sites supporting it users will be hard to come by.
As well, there's a cost issue here and the business models and the value proposition to individuals isn't yet clear.
Posted by P-Air , November 10, 2005 11:24 AM
I have to say that I disagree with Mary Hodder on this one. I think that it would be tremendously valuable to know what someone's eBay rating was in other contexts.
Let's say I'm on Craigslist - right now I have no trust mechansim. I'd much rather at least have the eBay one even though it might be imperfect. I also think that people will understand that when a rating is presented as an eBay rating that they will be able to contextualize what that really translates into.
Posted by Chris Law , November 10, 2005 01:39 PM
I agree with chris. The reputation that a person has developed on ebay can be a very valuable thing in lots of different ways. Though it is only really super valuable when it becomes a tool to enforce good behavior. People on ebay with great rep scores don't cheat because it would ruin their scores which develop a value greater then their potential gain from that act of cheating. So if a reputation score that is transferable (ie operable outside the individual systems) is going to valuable in the same way, then there needs to be a way add to that score in its transferred form that could then effect the score across the system. So with a transferable ebay rep score it would mean that I could post a bad review for a persons action outside ebay that would then show up on their score within ebay. That is a much tougher proposition.
Posted by Zach Coelius , November 10, 2005 05:20 PM
What is the correct reputation of George Bush? What is the correct reputation of the Pope? These values don't exist. Different human beings have different opinions about other people. Someone I consider my friend can be considered by you as your enemy. We need local (personalized) trust metrics, PageRank is a global Trust Metric and does no more make sense, in fact there are people working on personalizing PageRank.
I also think that reputation will be portable pretty soon: if I trust John as a programmer, I might also trust him as a co-worker, ...
Check Epinions.com Web of Trust
http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/?show=faq_wot
This is a better example of trust networks than Ebay.
Posted by paolo , November 10, 2005 07:24 PM
As part of the Opinity team, I want to say it's really great to see people talking about the portability of reputation. We deeply believe that at heart portability of reputation on the 'net ought to be a fundamental value proposition in just the way that it is fundamental that anyone on the 'net can exchange email with anyone else - not just within walled gardens, as in the early days before AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and yes MSN became part of the Internet.
And I don't think that this is in conflict with Mary Hodder's point of view. Rather to me it suggests just how much value there would be in each person being able to aggregate, authenticate, and use anywhere the elements of their own reputation profile that he/she thinks is best in each particular context. That way, it's not so much that there would be a 'system' for reputation that everyone would try to fit into. Rather, individuals could be free to aggregate and authenticate as much of a broad and deep reputation picture or profile of themselves as they feel would be worthwhile. And, the way we think about it at Opinity, individuals would also be completely welcome to put together multiple reputation profiles of themselves for different contexts, say one for ecommerce, one for professional purposes, one for political or dating or community forum purposes. An eBay rating could be shown in a profile or not as any particular person might deem wise for their purposes. The most important thing is that elements of a reputation profile can be made portable, aggregated, authenticated, and thereby be more useful and worthy of some degree of trust (depending on how broad, deep, and verified the profile is) everywhere on the 'net.
Posted by Bill Washburn , November 10, 2005 10:17 PM
You might be interested in
Trust in Web Based Social Networks. The Trust Project is an examination of issues related to using trust in web based social networks.
http://trust.mindswap.org/
Posted by paolo , November 11, 2005 11:03 AM
What is the correct reputation of George Bush? i agree with chris and zach, but i think this are intresting or?
Posted by seekXL , November 14, 2005 07:59 AM
I think reputations are portable - it's all about context. I posted on it here:
http://mashable.com/2005/11/11/actually-mary-reputations-are-portable/
Posted by Pete Cashmore , November 14, 2005 11:35 AM
I think iKarma.com is trying to do this...
Posted by Gary Culliss , November 14, 2005 11:09 PM
Trust is very important in this business. And it should be worked on.
Posted by Robert, ecommerce pro , November 24, 2005 12:05 PM
Aren't the credit reporting agencies... Experion/TransUnion, etc. example of a "reputation system"?
Obviously they're not completely general, but they're definitely used by many entities to answer "how likely is this person to pay back money they owe?". Perhaps by phrasing reputation in terms of specific probabilities, one could create reputation systems for other questions.
Just a thought.
Posted by toby , November 10, 2005 09:20 AM