Mergers and Potentials
So it looks like Opinity and Rapleaf have joined forces. The announcement of their partnership uses the term “silos of reputation” which I’ve used before to describe the current state of affairs regarding reputation. In other words, your credit rating is not related to your eBay reputation which in turn is not related to your driving record.
I suppose that making this information publicly available and bound to a single identity could be seen as problematic and dangerous, but I also think there any many advantages to be gained from visible histories, particularly when working or dealing with strangers. In the near-term I don’t think these advantages are quite as apparent as in the future, were these systems to become more widespread and frequented.
What kind of advantages am I talking about? Aside from the social benefits, which I’ve discussed in a previous post, and some of the potential advantages described in the Applied Dreams presentation, other include:
- Anyone can be a delivery or courier service (assuming adequate security safeguards). If you’re going to Berlin, and I need to get a package to someone in Berlin, then perhaps I can pay you to deliver that package for me. My past history with package deliveries might make you more or less inclined to use my services.
- Travel partners. Perhaps I’m looking for a companion to travel with around Europe. Aside from agreeable schedules, I could also use some reassurance about your character. Or perhaps I’m looking for a veteran traveller with good knowledge about a particular region.
- Restaurant recommendations. Sure, these already exist in rudimentary form, but there’s really no way to capture information about trends or affinities. Perhaps histories can reveal a particular person with food tastes similar to yours, which might mean that their assessment of a restaurant would closely mirror your own. In effect, histories can create personally meaningful and personally accurate judgements. Obviously this develops into massive complexity, but putting that aside for the moment, there’s no reason that these sorts of affinities need stop with restaurants: movies, hotels, museum exhibitions, books, and video games are all potential markets, to name a few.
- House guests. Briefly described in the presentation, perhaps you have built up such a great reputation as a house guest that any home in the world is potentially available to you. This sort of future integrates existing social networks into reputation management: how far removed from someone can you be to still enjoy these advantages? A friend of a friend of your aunt’s brother? Or can we imagine a world in which literally anyone would be willing to give you a place to stay?
- Intent to rent. Perhaps objects in the future will be intentionally designed to accommodate sharing and renting behavior as part of this system. You’ll buy a car with the idea that it provides an additional source of income at the expense of a few compromises. So the car might have roomier seats and more luggage capacity than its non-intentioned version. You could still rent anything and everything; “intent to rent” design just makes it easier.
These are just some of the potentials that reputation management systems could afford people. I’m working on some additional concepts and implementations as part of my thesis…
Any other ideas?