The internet is great for some things. Social networking? A lot of fun. Looking up academic references? Amazing. Shopping? Fantastic. And it's pretty good at facilitating communication, too: we now have more methods than we could possible ever need to get in touch with one another. But does it really help us get as much work finished as we imagine? I'm not sure. Think about calendars - which I'll return to in a future column. Or task management. The web really ought to be better than it is at helping us to get stuff done.
Think about online recommendations and reputation: that is, checking out people you might like to hire and researching businesses you might like to build relationships with. If anything, hasn't the internet made both tasks much more difficult?
Take Yelp. Even casual users of the web are by now familiar with the appalling reputation of Yelp's anonymised business reviews, which have enabled bitter ex-employees, their identity shrouded by the reviews site, to destroy businesses. Anyone with a grudge can leave a nasty smear against a restaurant's reputation. As for business services, there's really nowhere to go besides expensive due diligence services like Kroll and nosing around credit agencies and Companies House.
And then there's people. In March of this year, Mike Arrington from TechCrunch famously declared online reputation dead . I think he's right that we need to just accept that awkward photos and embarrassing remarks are here to stay. Even if you're judicious about what you say online, there's no guard against one of your friends posting drunken photos of you on Facebook or "overheards" on Twitter.
With new sites like Unvarnished that enable the same kind of drive-by assassinations as Yelp (with reviewers cloaked in anonymity), but for individuals, personal reputation is starting to become fragile online, and could be the next casualty of an open, anonymised internet where impersonation and identity theft is both commonplace and trivial to accomplish. I'm not the only person to think so: in the last few months, I've been hearing about loads of start-ups who are working on ways of directing you to "official" or verified social network accounts, or who are building entire reputation management systems that disregard the social stuff completely and focus on professional performance and company reviews.
They all seem to be built as closed systems. That makes sense, I guess, because they need a reliable way of verifying your identity. Take Duedil , an intriguing new "Silicon Soho"-based start-up that's building a crowdsourced due diligence system, based on reviews of companies that are published publicly. Duedil incentivises people to use their real names with badges, points and a variety of other Web 2.0-style nonsense (totally meaningless, but it seems to work - look at Foursquare). It remains to be seen how successful they'll be at getting honest feedback from people prepared to put their name alongside their remarks.
"There's a huge problem right now," says Duedil's founder, Damian Kimmelman. "There's really no way of working out who you should start building relationships with in business, nor who you should hire from the ever-increasing pool of freelancers out there. We think the future is in closed, trusted networks where people's own reputations are staked on the reviews they leave for others. These days the wider internet is basically useless for figuring out if someone is a good hire, or if a business is going to deliver the services they promise."
Duedil is focused on business reviews, but if due diligence comes down to people search, another start-up that might end up being useful is Qwer.ly , which describes itself as "a WHOIS for Twitter". It'll direct you to someone's Facebook, Flickr and other social network accounts, so you know you're looking at content from the right (and real) person. I wonder about the unintended consequences of pimping out your Qwer.ly listing, though: how we present ourselves on social networks is half the problem.
One of these services will end up taking off, and it'll provide a more reliable place for us to look into people and businesses without the huge fees normally associated with due diligence. It'll be a closed trust network that promotes and rewards transparency from its community. Meanwhile, the rest of the internet will continue to be an unsatisfying and dangerous place to investigate potential business partners.
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