Bad Boys For Life

Contrary to cliché, its not hard putting a value on reputation. Accumulate enough bad reviews on eBay or have your business flamed by enough blog writers, and you can literally count the dollars disappearing from your bank balance. Transactional trust has until now been the main focus of online reputation management systems, but is it the only game in town?

Reputation is the cornerstone of the smooth e-commerce systems we know take for granted. In the early days of the web, it was not so clear cut. Businesses like Verisign and Thawte sprung up certifying the identity of online merchants such that people now rarely think twice about using their credit card on the Internet. But it took an online auction business to really take the concept of blind trust to the next level.

Like you, I’m tired of the Pez Dispenser story. Someone who worked at eBay assured me once that the entire thing was an urban myth. A clever story devised to humanise the birth of a diabolical business model. But perhaps the smartest thing of all that the online auction house did was figure out how you get millions of people who have never met each other to trust each other long enough to do business.

If you have ever bought or sold something on eBay, you would have almost certainly clicked on the reviews describing the person you were dealing with. There are even literary conventions in play – A+++ rated, efficient service thank you, good seller would recommend, great buyer thanks!! It provides an odd but effective assurance that the person you are about to impart with your money or goods is both real and trustworthy.

During their recent analyst day, eBay CEO Meg Whitman suggested that eBay's reputation system could be decoupled from their respective services and offered as components of entirely new kinds of services. Along with Skype and Paypal, she saw eBay offering building blocks for a more customized Web. The idea of a decentralised reputation management network is an interesting idea, and one that a new startups like Rapleaf are also hoping to develop.

Rapleaf’s beta review network is compelling, if at this stage, somewhat rough hewn. You enter a mobile number or an email address, and then provide a short review and rating of the person and transaction you will involved with. This then updates a small tile which that person can display on their website, linked to their Rapleaf profile. You can see how this would benefit the rapidly emerging mini economy of infoproneurs who sell ebooks, advice or niche products through Google ad words, MySpace friend lists and blog networks. 

In my view we are the very beginning of an entire ecology of peer review based reputation systems. Ultimately, with enough scale user generated ratings may supplant the horrendously inaccurate and non transparent world of institutional credit ratings. For that to happen there needs to be another layer of complexity – weighting user ratings with the nature of the transaction and their authority. Someone reliably purchasing a car over the internet, for example, is a much more significant transaction that buying one of those nefarious lolly holders.

If you want my billion dollar tip, decentralised trust scores will also end up being factored into commercial search results as a useful signal in sorting good from the bad. Relevance and authority from link popularity is one thing. But when it comes to actually buying or selling large ticket items – finding the right deal is as much about the who as the what.

And so, yes. Sometimes there is such a thing as bad publicity. 

Comments

[Brad Argent]

Reputational systems add a layer of 'social compliance' to online transactions - be it buying an expensive item, organising a date or subscribing to a newsletter.

It's refreshing to see that despite our gravitation to 'remediated' forms of interaction we still want to know what other people think. To me this is evidence that online 'communities' are becomming the driving force of online commerce.

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What is the Pez Dispenser story?

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