What my friends say about me

Are you a member of Friendster yet? Friendster is a community for building reputation capital, for friends to identify one another and use those friends to meet new friends. It's like the old Sixdegrees.com site, only with a better interface, more JSP errors (it's in beta still) and a whole lot of room for improvement.

Reputation capital is a metric used in e-commerce to determine the trustworthiness of opinions, among other things. It's a deployed version of something we do every day anyway.

You trust your friends (or, in some cases, don't) and know what to believe, or not, based on your understanding of those people. With total strangers, it's impossible to do unless they've got some sort of systematized method for identifying what their reputation is. See, for example, EBay, where your reputation is built on how you perform your transactions - did the product arrive on time, if at all? Was it everything you said it was?

Of course, those systems, especially between third parties who have no formal identities except their EBay names, can be gamed. Get enough friends together to "buy" and "sell" junk items to one another, and run up your reputation score, allowing the gamer to fraudulently claim higher social status and trustworthiness.

But this is merely the first stab at an interesting, if vexing, problem. How do we take the intangibles in our head, those things we do on a half-subconscious level, and expand them outwards, towards the entire internet? Identification, at the root level, of friend vs. foe, and after that, going upwards, of trustworthiness, compatability, and probably sexual prowess.

New systems are emerging to tackle these problems. Friendster, FOAF and other systems are all working towards the same goal, but they're not getting there yet (as Sugarbaker pointed out more eloquently than I have here.)

The interesting human angle of Friendster, at least, is that your friends can comment on you, for the world at large. This inevitably cascades into their friends seeing it and making decisions on how to react to you based on those descriptions.

These are the two desciptions of me that I'm most entertained by:

1) He's a cross between mighty swingin and mighty sweet. Sort of like if Vince Vaughn's voice came out every time John Cusack opened his mouth. -- Dakota (I love this... so accurate...)

2) Jonathan gives the impression of being terribly louche. While if we were determining this by the number of experiences that your typical politician would define as kinky it may be true, the dirty secret is that he's actually quite sweet. He's also a polite young man (as long as pointed innuedo doesn't seem rude) -- Alexandra (bonus points for using the word Louche, which I had to look up in the dictionary)

Posted by Swerdloff at April 27, 2003 10:16 AM