Reputations are portable

Link: Sessions Top Ten Insights - Six Reputations Are Not Portable | Union Square Ventures.

I got stopped in my tracks in my RSS reader today because of Fred Wilson's title "Reputations are not portable".  He was referencing Mary Hodder's comments from Union Square's Sessions in which she pointed out that reputations are not portable.  She makes a great point about how she doesn't give EBAY's reputational system a whole lot of credibility.  Neither do I, but I think she's wrong on her larger point.  I also hope Fred hasn't totally abandoned his original concept.

I've already written down some of my thinking here.  I put less emphasis on the idea of reputations being portable as I do identity, but suffice to say that reputation is often a critical element of a person's identity, offline and on.   If and when identity becomes portable, then so too will reputation.

EBAY's reputation system is important to a lot of people, and I'm willing to bet those people would love to know another person's EBAY reputation if they encountered them in other circumstances.   With respect, the test is not whether Ms. Hodder buys into the reputation system of what she considers "a bizarre social environment", but whether the people who use it and rely on it everyday do.   I don't know, but I bet the rating of fellow auctioneers has been raised a time or two among power sellers talking face to face at EBAY Live.   If those same power sellers instead met on Match.com, don't you think the ratings would be interesting to them there too?

The EBAY reputation is a very important data point for certain social groups and a far less important one for others.  As a mix of a million social circles on the web, there is no single source of reputation data that will work for all of us.  That's why I think we should avoid hanging the concept of portable reputations on the credence some of us may or may not give to just one data point.  Looked at as data points, it would be enormously valuable for reputation type information to flow as freely as any other type of data.

For us business types, we can think of some data points we'd like to know when dealing with someone online.  What if someone went to our alma mater?  What if they had worked for the same employer as we had?  What if they knew someone we knew?  Similar to the real world, the biggest obstacle to the portability of reputation is verification.   Yet, the Internet holds a bigger promise for verification than the physical world.  Whereas employers still need to make a phone call to a university to verify educational credentials, we should expect web services to one day seamlessly and securely take care of it.

Currently, it is not in the interests of many holders of reputational data to freely contribute these data points to a larger identity initiative.  Robert Young made this point well.  However, as the web becomes more open and fluid, a course many of us cheer for,  I believe in many cases their own community will demand that they do.

Identity is an exceptionally hard problem, but it is a very interesting one.  I am committed to learning more in the coming year about the ongoing initiatives of some smart people like Libby Miller and  Dan Brickley.   I like the idea of Sxip, but I'm less into a private company making identity its mission and a little fearful that we will one day become a little too locked into some really large for-profit companies.  I sometimes wonder if a group like the Mozilla Foundation could play a  role.  I have lots more to think about on this topic, but I do hold hope for a community and technical solution and I think it will permit identity, and therefore reputation, to be portable. 

Comments

[Robert Young]

Hi Dorrian,

If you haven't already, you may want to read this... http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/11/ss_1.html.

Keep up the great posts!

[Cashmore]

Dorrian,

I posted on this earlier - I'll add a link to you. I'm in favor of portable reputations, because this shifts more power into the hands of the user:

http://mashable.com/2005/11/11/actually-mary-reputations-are-portable/

[Munjal Shah]

Dorrian, Since my Andale days I always believed that the eBay feedback rating was something that should be portable. You are 100% right about this. I realized that eBay with its walled garden approach is never going to do it. They percieve it as a major part of their network effect. It is still unclear to me how portable reputation will emerge as most of the valuable systems are specific to a single type of transaction (dating, trading / shopping). The generic ones never seem to take off.