Trust

My partner Brad and I were talking about Trust this week. It's the missing piece on the Internet today. Viruses, spam, spyware, comment spam, etc are all problems that point to the lack of trust. We wonder who is going to solve this problem.

One name we came up with is eBay. I was telling Brad about the way I scrounged some tickets to the Wilco show. I bought them from a woman I've never met who I paid in advance with PayPal and who showed up at the appointed time and place to give me the tickets. Why did I know that would happen? Because her seller's rating was perfect and she'd sold a lot of stuff on eBay. I figured why would she start screwing around now?

In fact, eBay is the most trusted Internet company according to the Ponemon Institute and the nonprofit TRUSTe, which polled more than 6,300 consumers for a study of trust on the Internet.

Could eBay take its seller ratings and profiles and do more with them? I don't know. It's hard at first blush to see how that is going to solve viruses, spam, spyware, and a ton of other trust-related issues. But it's worth thinking and talking about.

Comments

[hugh macleod]

Trust is the Alpha and Omega of capitalism, IMHO

Inspired by a thought of yours recently, ("Stop looking for the next big thing. Look instead for ways to solve problems. That's how to make money in tech"), I wrote a schpiel on trust:

"...Regardless of how the world changes, the one thing "The New Realities" cannot take away from you is trust. Your "trust"- the people you trust and vice versa- is what will feed you and pay for your kids' college. Nothing else. Stop worrying about technology. Start worrying about who trusts you."

URL here, for what it's worth:

http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000761.html

[Michael Davis]

This trust system is already in use for fighting spam and it works.

http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/ is a product that integrates into your email client. If you get a peice of spam you hit the spam button and it deletes thr spam but also marks that message as spam and sends that data to a central server. Once enough users have marked the message as spam then the system trusts the users and will automatically filter that spam for any other users of the product.

I hope this community of trust idea continues to spread.

[Toby]

I think wiki based sites are another great example of trust. Nothing is stopping people from posting trash, but normally you get a lot of decent information contributed. Personally I think the key to trust is community. As long as there is a healthy and growing social environment (even if it's just an aggregate of contributed information), there will be a tendencey towards trust. Reputation systems (such as e-bay's seller ratings) go a long way towards fostering such an environment.

[compelled]

Reputation -- karma, ratings, peer review, whatever -- has come a long way.

If you think about it, this is how Google works.

Slash and Scoop sites use this, too.

It's nice too see how far this has come. Seven or eight years ago, this was unproven technology. Today, the adoption rate is in many ways higher than our ability to refine the techniques. Seeing discussions about spamfilters and trust is oddly both satisfying and frustrating. The need, development, and use of filters has progressed rapidly, but our ability to react adequately is frustrating. (Regarding false positives because of simply aggregated blacklists, instead of weighting multiple reports from reputable sources, and such).

I wonder if there's a greater future in finding talent to create new solutions. The "bounty" model. Create incentive for people to work together toward developing a new technology by having people pledge to give a reward for a tool that accomplishes a set of goals...

[Bill G]

In real life, trust is something people extend carefully and, typically, in small increments.

It is both complex and contextual making an automated, 'one-size-fits-all' approach cumbersome and inflexible. For example: in many services people abuse trust by turning it into a counting game (Friendster, LinkedIn). And, while the person on eBay may be reputable in terms of delivering the product you paid for.....would you trust them in an entirely different context (watching your kids, for example)? Hard to say unless you know them in that different context.

The solution? Ultimately, trust on the Interent will emulate how we establish trust in real life. And that means the individual user will be in control & he will have the means to establish trust on a contextual basis.

[Jason Calacanis]

Great post.

Trust is huge in the media space, and I think blogs are in response to the lack of trust people now feel with traditional (read: consolidated) media. Can you trust CNBC with news about GE?

Remember the "Maybe rule of trust" -- Knowing you *might* be able to trust someone is worse than knowing you can't.

As we launched our latest blogs we found that a couple of readers were highly cynical. They figured we were getting paid to write about cars and baby strollers at the new sites.

I can't say I blame them. There are a number of blogs out there that are pay for play, and many more still that have over six ads per page.

I think all those ads confuse people (they also make the layout look horrible). We're trying to have either no ads or amazing ads on our blogs.

I'd rather not have the money from the crummy looking CPC/CPA ads that make blogs look horrible. These ads, when overdone, create the appearance of being in the pocket of the advertisers. You really have to be careful in making money from blogs... at make sites I see the ads from that ad blog network that don't look like ads but rather reviews of books--very bad for blogging.

This is a 3-5 year marathon this blog business. My primary goal is to create trust in our brands. That is the only way to make a business out of this.

[heif]

interesting stuff. i've been thinking that a Reputation Aggregator would be killer -- for social and biz purposes -- ebay rating, social network stats and testimonials, credit rating, buddy list analysis, community karma, officiated credentials, etc.

[BillG]

A central reputation system where peer-user feedback is aggregated (ie eBay) can still be gamed. It's far too easy to get a free anonymous email account and then get your buddies to give you favorable ratings.

More thought w/r/t to what a solution might look like: I think the combination of an irrefutable online identity is step 1. This needs to be verifiable using key certificates and signatures. This, combined with trusted 1-degree relationships and basic social-sense, makes a solid combination.

[greg stromberg]

We are the longest going unknown fad!