The camp is open until Sunday so if you feel like going to one of the coolest computer geek events in Europe there’s still time!

We really enjoyed talking at Reboot! Here are the slides, please do leave a comment if you have any thoughts.

If you are interested, please let us know and we’ll send you the manuscript (contact [at] trustmojo.com).

On a side note, we’re just on our way to Reboot9 for a trust-presentation (17:20 in the “small hall”), if you’ll be there come over and say hi!

[UPDATE] There’s now a full 18 minute video of our talk. And there’s a 24 minute podcast interview with us on What’s Next [In Swedish]. There’s also a pre-conference interview with us in Metro Teknik [In Swedish].

Trust has long been essential to all collaboration, commerce and the forming of community and society in the offline world. Trustmojo is a research project exploring the nature of interpersonal trust in the increasingly prominent world of web-mediated social spaces. The starting point of the project is a study on four california-based Web 2.0 services in which trust takes on vital roles. The study serves as the basis for an analysis that borrows theories from offline sociology in order to better understand how trust forms and transforms online. In this presentation some exciting findings will be exposed and discussed.

UPDATE: Here’s the talk.

So, big thanks to Adam Greenfield, Adam Wern, Alf Rehn, Ali Momeni, Andrea Saveri (Institute for the Future), Artur Bergman (LiveJournal), Auren Hoffman (RapLeaf), Ben Metcalfe, Bill Washburn (Opinity), BJ Fogg (Stanford), Caterina Fake (Yahoo!), Cathy Bishop (Google), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), Chris Plasser (Yahoo!), Christian Åkerhielm (Jung Relations), Chris Allen, Claus Dahl (Imity), Danah Boyd, David Danielson (Stanford), Ed Batista (AttentionTrust), Emil Sjöblom, Erik Arvidsson (Google), Eugene Whang (Apple), Felix Petersen (Plazes), Gary Butcher (Apple), Glen Murphy (Google), Howard Rheingold, Jari Koister (TN20), Joachim Stein, Johan Jörgensen, Johannes Fricke, Jordan Sissel (Google), Justin Montag (Apple), Jyri Engeström (Jaiku), Magnus Petersson, Marc Dangeard, Matt Biddulph, Michael Goldhaber, Mika Raento (Jaiku), Mike Love (Institute for the Future), Mike Micucci (TN20), Niels M.L. Pedersen, Nikolaj Nyholm (Imity), Noah Brier, Owen Thomas (Business 2.0), PJ Gupta, Sean Bonner (Metroblogging), Simon Goldin, Sjors Timmer, Stefan Kellner (Plazes), Steven Leckart (Wired), Tantek Çelik (Technorati), Tara Hunt (Citizen Agency), Ted Cho (Opinity), Ted Valentin, Thomas Hillard (EekaWeeka), Tom Conrad (Pandora), Tom Maddox (Opinity), Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and Yvonne French (Yahoo!).

There are still people we hope to talk to (over Skype). Jessica Hardwick (Swapthing), Michael Sippey (Vox), Ross Mayfield (Socialtext) and Stephanie Hendrick, to name just a few. Do you know more people in the trustspace? Add them to the wiki!

Over and out from Alex and Eric.

As we develop a literacy for tagclouds, they let us peek inside a person’s mind. We get more out of these clouds than just an idea of a person’s reading- and classifying habits. Tagclouds are inspiring. They contain hints. Those hints get our minds going.

My del.icio.us feed is just one facet of my online identity. Tags then, could be though of as facets of this facet. On one interpretation, the most common tags in my cloud show what community I belong to, whereas the tail of niche tags convey my distinct identity. Fred Stutzman (Founder of ClaimID) seems to have browsed a lot of tagclouds recently. He argues that “[people's] tagclouds shows [him] more about them than [he] ever gets from a homepage, blog or social network profile”. He also talks about “reading” del.icio.us tagclouds:

At the top will be [a person's] “internet identity”, more or less. You might see a ton of clustered links to programming websites, or business/marketing blog posts, and so on. As you scale down the tagcloud, and you get into the tags that are used 1 or 2 or 3 times, you start to notice different things. You may see links to a sports team in which the person participates, or a small cluster of links to a hobby or a charity. You might see travel information, or a link to a church or family member’s webpage. As the explorer, you have to explicate what is what, but I’ve found it becomes quite easy to do this as you do it over and over.

Just before our talk, Marc Dangeard, who was attending the meeting, happened to give me his business card. Incidentally, he had his del.icio.us tagcloud printed on the back of the card.

Perhaps the most important reason to give someone your business card is to convey trustworthiness. Trust research show that openness has a strong connection to trustworthiness. Tagclouds let us take a peek inside someone’s mind. Seen in this light, putting your tagcloud on your business card makes perfect sense.

The second story, about post-ratings within intimate google groups and the conflict of large scale systems and informal interactions brings up Tönnies concept of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. These two sociological “normal types” serve as an interesting framework for looking at some of the tensions within social formations and the slides lists a few dichotomies between them. The third story concerns trust as a transitive property and uses Granovetter’s ideas about weak ties to ask if transitive trust is at all useful in the scenarios where it might exist. The fourth and final story shows an example of some fine “googlestalking” and also how Internet users find new ways of interpreting the digital body and assessing social cues in order to establish trust.Apart from all the fun we had talking to the Innovation TechDev group and the always insightful Caterina we also got the chance to meet up with Yvonne French, senior product manager for the Yahoo! reputation platform, to discuss Yahoo’s point of view on trust topics. Yvonne had a good point that is worth remembering; we know that reputation is context sensitive but that doesn’t mean that the same reputation can not be used in several contexts. The issue is, of course, about finding the contexts where reputation can cross successfully. Furthermore, we can never remind ourselves too often that a context is not defined by an URL–a website might encompass several contexts in the same way that a context might entail many websites.

To finish off the already great day we met up with Tom, Ted and Bill from Opinity for a relaxed yet insightful talk about online identity, trust, philosophy and even some sci-fi… Among other things, we talked about third-party institutions that have the possibility of acting as a trust-mediator in order to guarantee a certain fact about somebody without the necessity to disclose the fact itself to the asking party. I.e. somebody could ask a trusted third party to verify that my email is indeed connected to a real person with a valid credit card without me having to reveal my credit card number or my actual name to them. In many cases this makes sense since the asking party might not be interested in the actual information per se but rather just in the verification of its existence.

On another note, we are hoping to do a small talk about trust tomorrow at BarCampStanford so if you’re in the neighborhood please come join us!

Sort by trust in TrustMail.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could sort your inbox by “relevance”? I thought so too, but then I took a look at my own inbox while trying to think of a rating for each mail that was there. And guess what–it turned out to be quite hard. In fact, in some cases I couldn’t come up with a rating at all, and in other cases I could think of several different ratings for the same person.

Why? Well, we know already that reputation demands context. So whenever I thought of a rating, I had to artificially place the person in a context, which felt somewhat awkward, arbitrary and at times plainly wrong. Which context to choose? What if there were multiple? What if there was none at all?

This is also the reason why the system probably wouldn’t work well anyway. Reputation scores that are inferred by the algorithm are calculated without taking context into account. So let’s say my friend’s boss sends me a mail. I trust my friend, my friend trusts his boss. And yet, the mail from my friend’s boss has little relevance to me. Both reputation scores are accurate in themselves, but when we collapse the contexts around them, they loose their meanings.

So, we need a way of saying “I trust you in this particular context”. But then we run in to issues of etiquette and fingerspitzgefühl. By saying explicitly “I trust you in the context of work” I’m tacitly saying “I don’t trust you outside of work”. Apart from the high cognitive load, I’m actually being rather tactless.

Needless to say, given that I couldn’t even trust my own ratings of my own friends, I’m a bit skeptical of the Trustmail approach. The same critique is valid for many other reputation systems. Clay Shirky puts it rather harsh but well: “Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren’t linearizable, and they’re not portable. […] The world’s best reputation management system is right here, in the brain”.

Time flies! We will stay in San Francisco another two weeks and then we’re off to Stockholm again. Tonight we’ll be at the TechCrunch party to represent Plazes.

We talked with Auren Hoffman (CEO, Rapleaf) about their rating service the other day. They want to break out the buyer-seller-rating component of eBay–a bold act that is not without problems (Oh no, the silos fight back!). After all, one of the most important preconditions for building reputation is context. Like Tom Dell’Aringa puts it in a comment: “I can honestly tell you that a Rapleaf score would mean zero to me in eBay. I don’t care about what some 3rd party rep system states about a person on eBay. I want to know what their rep is inside eBay!”

I have a hard time figuring out whether RapLeaf’s very Web2.0ish service (api:s, openness, componentization, you got it) is the right way to go in this case. I believe dealing with reputation takes some fingerspitzgefühl. This is a tip from the RapLeaf blog:

“Going on a date? Worried you’re on the Dontdatehimgirl website? Offset that! Send her an email with your RapLeaf badge in the signature. She’ll see that you’re a good guy.”

Wow, isn’t that like putting your credit rating in a love letter? Or am I getting something wrong? It reminds me of the story about the woman who wants to go partying with her friends. Her husband says: “I trust that you won’t cheat on me”. This story illustrates very well what happens when talk about trust gets to explicit. In this case the woman gets seriously offended–saying something like that is a clear sign of distrust. [My supervisor told me the story. I believe he found it in Lagerspetz]

A Colombian artist told me the flipside of this story yesterday. Some time ago she walked into a store–in a small village where she’d never been before–to buy some milk. When she wanted to pay she realized she didn’t have any money on her. The owner of the store immediately offered her credit. “How can you offer me credit when you don’t know me?” was the obvious question to ask. “I’d rather lose my money than my trust” was the owner’s swift reply.

A village, a marriage, a date, an eBay auction. Context seems important. Fingerspitzgefühl too.

[UPDATE: Noted that the part on the date quoted above has been removed from the blog post over at RapLeaf. Good move.]