Reputation Portability

Ebay and its users enjoy amazing network effects. The site’s value to its users- buyers and sellers- is limited only by the functionality, terms and conditions and service levels Ebay chooses to provide. And depending on who you ask, Ebay could do all these things better, and there are others who do.

And yet, despite the issues, buyers and sellers haven’t switched allegiance en masse. I would argue one of the reasons they stay is their hard-won community-specific reputations. Buying and selling online is still not an activity for the un-savvy. And for all our willingness to participate in the sharing economy, it’s still not that easy to assess the trustworthiness of the other players. Ebay’s reputation scoring system, flawed or not, is still a powerful asset for both buyers and sellers.

The ability to aggregate and assign some sort of value to our online behaviour across communities and transactional sites, would allow people to harness the value of their behavioural data more effectively. Reputation portability would lower the barriers to entry for new service providers. They’d be able to leverage a more comprehensive, more representative online reputation, which their users had built over time through varied online transactions across a number of communities, rather than forcing them to start from scratch, within the narrow setting of their own service and nascent community. This can only be a good thing for the sharing economy.

But even more importantly, I think users being able to leverage their online behaviour and associated reputation outside of the community and transactions in which they were established will go some way to changing views on data ownership, especially when it comes to behavioural data.

There was a time when mobile phone numbers were associated with the mobile network operator - not the user. Mobile Number Portability changed that and with it, users’ relationship with their phone numbers. A phone number became less something users leased from their network operators and more an asset they controlled. This shift in perspective had an impact on the relationship dynamic between users and service providers by making switching operators a less painful process- a contributing factor in the increased levels of competition in the telecoms market.

That’s why I’m really excited by early movers in this area, such as Karma. It’s early days yet and the process isn’t perfect. I’d like to see greater transparency in how they calculate the final reputation score and understand how they weight vouches from friends and family etc, but it’s a good start. We need more such service providers and more control in the hands of users. After all, it’s our data and our reputations that will determine how solid a foundation the sharing economy gets built on.