TrustPlus

TrustPlus Preview Launch!

Today we have launched the official public beta of the TrustPlus service! It's been a ton of hard work getting the service and tools to this state, but we've been having a blast along the way! You can read about the launch in our press release.

Please check out the site and start building your TrustCircles today. Help keep your friends, colleagues, and family safer online. Rate people. Rate your friends. Rate your baby sitters. Rate your colleagues.

Don't just rate... collabo-rate!^tm.

Download the TrustPlus Reputation Viewer so you can view and create reputation on sites such as craigslist, Facebook, LinkedIn, eBay, Backpage.com, and MySpace. Visit our friends at iMoondo to see reputation in-the-wild.

This blog has been very quiet the last few months, but we're back up from the trenches! Watch this space for more interesting news about TrustPlus and online trust and reputation.

Together, we can make the Internet the Safest Place on Earth^tm.

Accountability Online

Brad Feld put up an interesting post this morning entitled "Anonymous Bullies" that discusses blogger Kathy Sierra's extremely unfortunate experience receiving death threats (warning: there's some really unpleasant stuff in there) via blogs and emails.

Brad asserts that

reputation and trust are at a tipping point and are an issue that is going to have to be dealt with in 2007

Obviously, we at TrustPlus concur. Living eyeballs-deep in the online reputation space, we know that it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Sadly - very sadly - we can all but count on today's problems escalating into something beyond mere threats. As more and more  people blog, post on chat boards, and contribute to wikis, the online community will become more and more diverse. Unfortunately, one doesn't have to look too far or too hard to see the unpleasantness that intolerance of diversity can create. To borrow a line from General Motors: this isn't your father's Internet.

The Internet requires systems to help assert accountability - while maintaining the healthy pseudonymity that exists today. Bad people need to be isolated. Good people need to bring their positive reputation everywhere they surf. These are difficult, but solvable problems.

Community site owners need to think about these challenges and adopt solutions to help  communities manage and police themselves. Reputation is, to some degree, just another piece of user-generated-content. Community site infrastructure creators (e.g., e-commerce platforms, blogging platforms, wiki tools, etc.)  also need to think hard about these issues. Everybody is and can be part of the solution.

Let us of course not forget that the user community has tremendous power online. Folks need to, in true Network fashion, get mad as hell and not take it anymore.

Shawn

Whose Trust Is It?

The folks at Trust Who recently completed an interesting analysis of some of their transactions, curious to know if PayPal account status was a driver in determining fraud.

What they found, which did not surprise us, is that PayPal account status provided no significant fraud signal. What curbed fraud most was performing customer verifications, which I assume to mean credit card verifications (AVS, CID, geo-location, etc.).

This is not surprising because PayPal's account status features serve primarily PayPal. Every means of understanding trust online must be consumed in the context of who that means of trust primarily serves.

eBay's feedback system is another good example of this. You'd be hard-pressed to argue against the assertion that their system serves eBay first, power-sellers second, general sellers third, and buyers fourth.

Trust online needs to be measured and mediated by an independent third party, just as the folks at FairIsaac provide the industry-standard FICO credit scores and Consumer Reports provides its trusted independent product reviews.

Wired on Reputation

The current issue of Wired has a great article online entitled Herding the Mob. Author Annalee Newitz does a nice job of outlining examples of why online reputation is important and how online reputation is at risk today. TrustPlus exists to solve exactly these problems, and is doing so as we type/read.

Shawn (with props to Chris)

USPTO and Reputation

With a tip of the hat to Seth Levine and Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group, the Washington Post had an interesting article this week about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is opening up Patent applications for commentary, apparently in a Wikipedia-like manner.

The good news is that this appears to be a rational, thoughtful step forward for patent processing. The number of dubious patents that have been issued is truly impressive. An open, community-driven public-comment process has the potential to materially limit the issuance of sub-optimal patents.

The bad news is that it seems probable that the USPTO is going to have some real challenges in policing this community of commenters. It would be unfortunate to see something this important get brushed aside at the end of the day due to bad actors. This is a manageable problem - let's hope it gets managed properly.

Shawn

Server Work Completed

The server work we began a week ago has been completed.  If you have any problems getting onto the site, please contact us and we will investigate immediately.

Michael

WebInno 10 - Thanks!

We wanted to say thank you to all the folks who took the time to demo TrustPlus at the Web Innovators Group event on Tuesday. Hats off to David Beisel and Masthead Venture Partners for making this all happen, and for inviting TrustPlus to participate.

A number of bloggers have had nice things to say about TrustPlus - thank you all. I wanted to take a moment to mention some of the commentary.

Mark Doerschlag of MarksGuide was kind enough to include a picture of Michael and myself, punch-drunk from a few hours of demos.

Over on  Over The River, Greg Peverill-Conti shared the following:

I didn’t much care for the fact that the system requires a TrustPlus email to work...

The free online classifieds sites (craigslist, Backpage.com, etc.) generally operate via email. So we integrate with them via email. Our helper tools automatically insert your @trustpl.us email address into your new posts so you don't have to even think about it. We would surely prefer that craigslist simply integrated us fully into their system, but we're not quite there yet! If you want to create and explore TrustPlus reputation on MySpace or eBay, for example, you do not need to concern yourself with an @trustpl.us email address.

Greg also shared:

These guys are working to make reputation portable - so that feedback made about you on eBay can follow you...

We should state, for the sake of the exceptionally large number of attorneys at eBay, that we are not scraping eBay's feedback data. Though we are hoping we can help eBay "un-silo" that data in the future.

David Evans on Online Dating Insider shared a similar concern about a new email address, though the dating sites we are planning to support should not require an @trustpl.us email address.

The folks at 52 Bicycles shared:

But was impressed with the guys who seem cognizant of the issues, even as they were coy with their plans to address them.

I guess we should apologize for being a bit coy here and there. It wasn't because we were protecting national security secrets; rather we were just trying to keep the demo focused solely on the product. Sorry about that!

Of the bloggers I had the pleasure of meeting, Rod Begbie was surely a stand-out - thanks for taking the time, Rod.

Shawn

Precious Screen Real Estate

Last week I experienced an odd synchronicity of discussions and news items on the issue of browser plugins consuming too much real estate in the browser window.

The burgeoning browser plugin space is likely to get messier before it gets better. There are a number of design issues to be tackled by us, the developers of plugins, but this screen real estate issue is obviously the one that hits users first and foremost.

I was happy that in these discussions I could demonstrate that the TrustPlus Reputation Tools plugin consumes virtually no screen real estate. We designed the UI from the get-go to be as non-intrusive as possible, and to be extremely respectful of the underlying site content. The folks I was talking with were impressed with our thoughtful design. While that was encouraging for us, it underlined the point that  users, apparently, have expectations that plugins are profligate in their use of their precious screen real estate.

All of us designing plugins should try to be as thoughtful as possible in this regard, lest we inadvertently create a culture 0f avoidance

Shawn

TrustPlus Server Updates Sat. 01/27

We will be moving some of our servers on Saturday. If your DNS is slow to update, you may not be able to get to the servers during the transition. Keep trying! If you have problems for more than an hour or so, please contact us and let us know (the email servers will be unaffected). Most folks shouldn't notice the transition at all.

Michael

MySpace support!

We just put initial MySpace support live. If you haven't already, download the TrustPlus IE or Firefox browser plugin and start creating and viewing reputation on MySpace. It's in beta, so we've got a few more things to tweak, but please tell us what you think!

Shawn