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Connection sites and trust metrics
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 8:00 am on 1/31/2003
It turns out there’s another new take on Six Degrees, called everyonesconnected.com, that has some interesting spins on the idea of a social-connections site too. But it also turns out that neither it nor Friendster matter at all. The reason is trust.
I’m not going to go real deep into what a trust metric is, because for this version, the math wouldn’t necessarily have to be that overwrought anyway. It’s very simple: there are some friends you’d trust with your seat at Starbucks, but far fewer you’d trust with your car keys, and even fewer with, say, your sister in a tube top. Work out a simple numeric scale for different levels of trust, or, if you’re smarter than I am, a more complex matrix of situational variables.
The next level is, I might trust my friend, but do I trust her taste in people? Do I recommend that other people trust the people she trusts? You don’t want to just let people on your system make sight-unseen judgments about people they haven’t met or interacted with, but a secret, blanket judgment about her general taste might be helpful whilst being too vague to cause any damage. These ratings could percolate throughout the system, giving you a better sense of how much to invest in interactions with those fifth-degree types. (I have yet to run across anyone on Friendster who’s more than four away. The system’s still small, and certain of my first-circle friends are abnormally well connected, but still, makes you think.)
I know that trust problems are more complex than I paint them here, possibly to the point of being wicked. But this is the way we’re heading: not just to the semantic web, but the social web. We’re going to have to map more knowledge of finely nuanced social behavior into our game rules. Maybe we’re headed into a space that only humans are ever going to be good at. (For that matter, maybe I am.)
January 31st, 2003 at 1:34 am
Trust Metrics
Mike Sugarbaker: “It’s very simple: there are some friends you’d trust with your seat at Starbucks, but far fewer you’d trust with your car keys, and even fewer with, say, your sister in a tube top.”
February 15th, 2003 at 12:36 pm
Have a look at advogato: http://advogato.org
February 19th, 2003 at 8:53 am
On Everyone’s Connected, there is a concept of links. By letting someone link to you allows them to write things about you. Would you want any strangers writing in your profile? In addition to this, you have to describe your relationship to the person you are linking to. This, we see as a subjective measure of trust.
April 27th, 2003 at 3:25 am
What my friends say about me
Friendster, FOAF etc… Trust metrics are interesting, especially when you get to see what your friends really have to say about you.