15 Jun 09 Reputation portability and social network APIs

The idea of portable reputations in digital media has been around for many years, but not much has happened. The idea is fairly simple – create a means of taking credibility (or the lack of it) from one digital community to another, so that you’re not starting from zero each time you join a new one. When Usenet and CompuServe were the only games in town, this didn’t really matter, but with the explosion of social media in the last few years, it seems like reputation portability is becoming more attractive and practical. There are big obstacles, starting with the definition of terms.

“Reputation” is in the family of vague terms like “engagement,” “influence” and “community.” They sound very impressive. “People ith high positive reputation scores generate community engagement” sounds like one of those phrases that expensive consultants toss around at industry conferences, loaded with implications and empty of specific meaning. Nevertheless, reputation means something, even if we can’t agree what it is. It has at least two components – a value and a valence. For example, honesty is part of reputation; when its valence is negative, we call it dishonesty. Of course, personal reputation in digital communities has more to do with accuracy, interesting-ness and opinion leadership than black-and-white issues like honesty.

Even if everybody agrees on what reputation can mean, the way it happens varies from one community to another.  Take “following” relationships, for example.  Following somebody on Facebook requires their permission, but not on Twitter.  Similarly, the way Twitter is dominated by “open” accounts means that being quoted (retweeted) on Twitter is more likely to happen and therefore possibly less significant than elsewhere.  Some communities have explicit voting and scoring systems that rank people, posts, pictures and so forth.  Few mean the same things, especially when they are based on raw scores from communities of vastly different sizes.  If nothing else, this means that nobody is going to come up with a definitive reputation ranking system, which is probably just fine.  There are many possible dimensions to reputation and various purposes for it, so I would expect that it’s a good thing if many systems arise.  I’m wondering if they will start to arise by way of the rising number of social media APIs.

Open APIs not only allow third parties to experiment with reputation scoring systems for each social network – for example, all the Twitter influence scoring systems – they allow third parties to try out reputation mashups, which implies some sort of reputation portability.  FriendFeed, being a social network mashup itself, is the kind of service that enables this.  Anybody who has claimed more than one social network identity on FriendFeed potentially could bring their reputation from one to the other, since the links on FriendFeed tell third parties that the two identities (a/k/a accounts or profiles) belong to the same person.  For example, if I have a large following on Twitter, then sign up for Facebook, a third party could inform Facebook users that I’m worth following, even though I haven’t done a thing yet on Facebook.  That capability becomes particularly interesting in terms of competition between social networking sites.  When the next Twitter comes along, whatever that might be, people may be able to get deeply engaged in it faster because of Twitter’s open API… assuming the new guys also have an open API, of course.  Some of this is already happening between partnering social media sites, where you are invited to bring your friends along.  That’s only mildly interesting because it doesn’t happen between direct competitors.  When the APIs generally support reputation-related data and third parties are the ones who make the marriages, so to speak, the world becomes very interesting.  That’s not just because of what you can do, but also because of what it makes harder – spamming.

Spammers will have a much harder time in a system of shared reputation data precisely because the social media networks are somewhat different from each other.  Spamming is harder on some, easier on others, so if somebody shows up only on the “easy” ones, that’s a strong clue that they are not legitimate.  If my follower relationships on Twitter are people with whom I have some sort of genuine relationship, I would expect a high percentage of them to be present on other social networks.  Open APIs let third parties measure the differences and make some estimates of the likelihood of legitimacy.  This feels to me something like the kind of robustness that arises from genetic diversity – yes, you might be able to conquer an individual or two, but you probably can’t beat the whole ecosystem at its own game.

One thing that becomes harder in this environment is creation of multiple, distinct identities.  Some will argue that people want to keep their personal, work and perhaps entertainment identities independent of one another.  The idea is that if you get your jollies in some socially embarrassing manner, you don’t want your boss or potential employer to find out.  Or, more legitimately, perhaps you are part of a 12-step program and you want to participate anonymously, or more correctly, pseudonymously, since you’ll want to create and use a pseudonym for that purpose.  I’ll respond to the first idea with a motto that is used in recovery – “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”  The more I consider the idea of having distinct, private identities for work, personal life and whatever else you think you need them for, the more I think it is rubbish.  Unless you’re spying for the CIA, there really isn’t much need to compartmentalize your life that way.  And I mean “compartmentalize” in the bad way, really.

I rarely truly believe anything I write like this until I’ve seen some data, so my next step will be to explore some of the APIs to see what I can tell about myself and others through multiple APIs.  I’m hoping that will be the subject of a blog post in a few days.