Social Glass

Wikipedia defines a reputation system as “a type of collaborative filtering algorithm which attempts to determine ratings for a collection of entities, given a collection of opinions that those entities hold about each other”. On the web, companies like eBay and socialpicks use reputation systems to let users make informed choices about who they buy products from or who’s advice they follow. Socialpicks, in my mind, is the most interesting of the two, as an investors reputation improves with accuracy. If, for example, a given investor rates GOOG as “buy”, and Google’s stock price subsequently goes up, he’s considered accurate.

Enterprise 2.0 applications like Clearspace have reputation systems that rate users on a number of factors including comments and document contributions, but I have yet to see an application that allows a company to create reputations for people they do business with.

Imagine if a realty like Remax had the ability to rate all of the realestate brokers from other agencies it does business with (in the US the buyer and seller both have realestate agents). Over time, Remax would gather a rich amount of valuable information about individual realtors - information that could help Remax make informed decisions about making an offer on a house based on the reputation of and past experience with the seller’s realtor, for example.

Perhaps this is where Enterprise 2.0 becomes a bit too “big brother”-like, especially if the business partner doesn’t know his activity is being analyzed by a reputation system. But I think with proper disclosure, a system like this could definitely add value. Think banks and mortgage brokers, suppliers and distributors etc.