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My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned
by vyrotek 17y ago
My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m hoping that sites will want to partner and award badges since they can get some visibility with links on the profile pages of users.
The system is based on the email addresses you used with the services you use. You can claim multiple addresses and manage them as a single profile. Another important feature is that the service does not require user registration to benefit from it. For example, StackOverflow.com might decide that you earned the 'Teacher' badge. They would make a call to our API and say "give youremail@example.com the Teacher badge". Even if we didn’t have that email is our system yet, we would record the action and the owner of that email can claim their badges later. Now when you sign up or use other sites they could place badge requirements upon registration or when trying to access special features. Perhaps all new users must have at least 3 StackoverFlow badges and 2 Twitter badges. Maybe a game forum requires that you have X WoW achievement to post comments. In a way, it becomes a sort of CreditScore for your contributions to other sites.
Also, since blog comment integration seemed like the perfect way to share your profile's URL, the system works similar to Gravatar. By MD5 hashing an email, you are able to link to someone's profile without exposing the email address associated with the page. So when you leave a comment on a blog, the blog engine can hash the email and link to your profile. Now we can all see how awesome you are on the internet.
As you can tell, this isn’t complete. I finished enough to get the idea across and get some feedback. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. I wrote and designed this all myself and I could also use some suggestions on how to take things to the next step. Does it sound like an idea that really needs my full attention and possible VC funding since I depend on partnerships? Is this something you would use? Can other sites and services be bothered to publish this sort of data?
This is my example profile: http://www.kabadge.com/User/Profile/11d39fe94051978a44ce887a4f1a2a0b http://www.kabadge.com/User/Profile/11d39fe94051978a44ce887a...
- hopeless 17y agook, interesting idea and nice site but where's the business case? i.e., "show me the money!"
- jdrock 17y agoAt scale, this site/idea could theoretically "own" the reputation market. There's definite value in that.
- michael_dorfman 17y agoThere may or may not be (monetary) value in that. That's why the business model is necessary. Popularity does not necessarily equal financial success.
- rokhayakebe 17y agoKabadge, The FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) of the Social Internet.
- joshsharp 17y agoTrying to consolidate a person's reputation across the web is a great idea, and one that's only going to become more important. However, I'm glad I read your explanation here because the site itself tells me very little and without reading your explanation I probably would have shrugged and kept browsing. Put this explanation on your site, and show people an example profile. You really do have a "chicken and egg" problem trying to get providers to see the value. My two cents would be to write some blog posts on "the reputation currency" and try to get as much attention out of that as you can, getting people excited and enthused (and bumping up your own reputation on the topic). To me that seems like the best way (short of reaching out to many partners) to gain some traction. Good luck!
- MicahWedemeyer 17y agoI would never limit access to a feature on my site based on badges someone has earned on another site. It's like slapping a big sign up that says, "In order to use this site, you also need to sign up for X, Y, Z, ..." It's hard enough to get users to sign up for my stuff, let alone make them sign up for something else. Throwing in additional roadblocks is definitely not the way to go. That's not to say I'd be against showing the badges they've earned elsewhere. That would be nice, I suppose. Another problem: If things go very well for you, you'll end up with hundreds of partners all pushing badge info. On the other side, you'll have consuming partners that want to use this data, but they'll need to know exactly what badges to extract. Not every user will have the same badges from the same sites, so the consuming sites have to do the legwork of deciding which badges they want to display. Further, if site X decides to change their badges, all sites that consume from X will need to change as well, or just keep displaying the now stale data. Seems like too much communication will be necessary between all the different parties.