Online reputation online is a fascinating area, partially because eBay, through their feedback score, is the only company to have reached scale. Startups like Rapleaf and iKarma are still young and struggling. Perhaps their flaw has been in taking the high road, and going out of their way to ensure that reputational feedback is being left by verified identities. New startup Gorb, which I first read about on David Berlind’s blog, takes no such high road. Gorb allows, even insists on, anonymous comments and ratings about an individual. Like someone? Hate them? Tell Gorb all about it, using their handy Ajax slider to rate them from 1 – 10 in their professional and personal lives, and leave written comments as well. Arguing that a “non-anonymous system also contains “noise,” as reciprocity creates a fake positive response,” Gorb founder Leonard Boord (trash or glorify him here) thinks that anonymous feedback is the only way to go. They do have some checks on the wholesale slaughter of people’s reputations. Each written comment can be voted, Digg style, up or down by other users. If lots of people agree with you, your reputation is enhanced. If they disagree, your reputation suffers. The person being discussed may also respond to each comment. I agree with Boord that services like LinkedIn are often a farce – people leave good feedback on others in the hope that the gesture will be returned. And since the user must approve feedback before it is published to the site, only gushing testaments to perfection ever see the light of day. Rapleaf does a much better job than LinkedIn at getting balanced feedback from users. But there is still a cost to posting something negative – Rapleaf isn’t an anonymous service, and comments are at least tied to a user name. With Gorb, there’s absolutely nothing to lose by telling someone how bad they smell, or how much you dislike the tone of their voice. Libel away. I think Gorb goes too far, and will appeal mostly to people who have highly negative things to say about others. Without fear of being held accountable for their words, people may go a little overboard in their quest to “help” people know the truth about themselves. But Gorb also has the smell of success about it. People will be drawn to this in the same way they slow down when they pass → Read More
Company: iKarma Launched: August 6, 2005 Location: Jupiter, Florida iKarma is an online feedback and reputation system that we’ve been kicking the tires on for a few days. While there are many closed, centralized feedback services that are quite useful (ebay’s feedback, for instance), they are a part of the service they support and cannot be leveraged effectively outside of those services. I think they may be on to something really big here, but in my humble opinion they need to embrace the ideas of open services and open data. If they do that, I can see important third party applications being built on the back of iKarma. I expand on this below under “What it Needs”. The Basics You can register for iKarma directly at their site or via an email from someone who would like to write about you. Once you’ve registered you get an initial five-star review from the iKarma team and are encouraged to add contacts and begin writing about people. If they aren’t members, you can invite them. A review consists of a star rating (0-5) and a free-text area. Your overall star rating is averaged among all reviews. If you don’t like a review, you can leave a comment with an explanation or choose to start a more formal challenge process. You can only leave a review for any given member once; however, you can edit all aspects of a review if you change your mind later. The basic service is free and iKarma plans to roll out paid premium services in the future. To see our iKarma profile, click the icon below, or here. What We Like iKarma does one thing, reputation, very well. It has a clean and usable interface and no bugs were found. I also like that comments can be edited later on if the author changes her or his mind. What it Needs eBay has certainty that two parties have done business because they (eBay) close transactions and know who both parties are. A necessary limitation of the iKarma is that they have no idea if someone posting a review actually knows or has transacted with the person they are writing about. iKarma has mitigated this problem somewhat by creating a formal challenge process to any posted review. I really like the point system in eBay. There is no upper limit on total feedback and I believe people use → Read More
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