3 ms·

Can you elaborate on the trust issue?

• ErrantX 16y ago
  Well it's a two pronged idea - a) how do you know someone is who they say they are on the internet (i.e. in a social setting anonymity can have its downsides) and b) even "known" people can be untrustworthy and jerks or simply "not your type of person". So the question we went for was "can we build a trust based social network where peoples interrelations helped show others how trustworthy (aka sound) they are". The long term idea was to kick of a trusted identity scheme and wrap a social network on top. The build out from that was a social dating site which we would monetize. It failed for a few reasons. The concept wasn't well defined, and neither was the problem in all honesty. We were excited about the tech and less so about the execution, spent a lot of time working on the caching code and some framework code etc. and not enough time executing the idea. We never launched (though we could have a couple of times). The other problem was that the idea would have synced with the tech crowd - but probably less so with the mass market, and we didn't put any thought into how to get the idea across to them. It wasn't a total failure; I sold some of the code to another social network startup for a lot more than it was worth. They were a VC backed outfit that floundered shortly afterward - so I wasn't the worst example out there :P