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Rachel Botsman:

"Presently, reputation data doesn't transfer between verticals. Consequently, if a host has a high rating on Airbnb, but no reputation on a competitor's platform, they can feel locked in. "I imagine that people will leverage their Airbnb reputation in ways that we can't yet imagine," Chesky says. "Airbnb could become a story of your life and that story should be able to follow you." A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "Reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.

His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."

When asked for the sources upon which a user's trustworthiness is based, reputation startups list the usual suspects -- LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter -- but refuse to go further, saying that the algorithm is proprietary. For these trust-validation services to become credible they're going to need to differentiate their products from those offered by companies such as PeerIndex, Kred and Klout, which collect digital information from different social-media sources. Their metrics -- who I "follow", who "follows" me, who I know professionally, where I check in, what I chat about -- are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action," says Joe Fernandez, cofounder of San Francisco-based Klout (wired 08.12). "Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"

Influence Aggregators are trailblazers for the bigger reputation economy. Yes, it's easy to point out that a Klout score is merely a popularity contest, but what the likes of Klout and PeerIndex are starting to show is that it's possible to extract value from the information exchanged by groups across networks. "Think about people on social media," says Azeem Azhar, the 39-year-old founder of PeerIndex. "They are spending around 500 minutes a month investing time on their networks. It's like they are building a living CV across their lives, so it makes it important for them to get value out of that."

Early influence and Reputation Aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations. Sure, you might be an impeccable Airbnb host, but does that mean I would trust you with my car? "When you build reputation in a specific system," explains Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, whose work focuses on trust dynamics in online interactions, "it must be seen in light of the social dynamics, the population and the unique characteristics of that system."

Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation. On Stack Overflow, for instance, reputation is a measure of knowledge; on Airbnb it's a measure of trust; on Wonga it's a measure of propensity to pay; on Klout and PeerIndex it's a measure of influence.

Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.

It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.

The most basic level is verification of your true identity -- is this person a real person? Are they are who they say they are? It's also foreseeable that data giving a good indicator of character, such as reliability and helpfulness, in one marketplace is a baseline of how you will behave in another marketplace. Do we do what we say we are going to do? How well do we respect another person's property? Can we be trusted to pay on time? But the big, sticky area around porting reputation lies in the space of shared interests, values and connections that can be pulled from the social graph. Currently platforms such as Airbnb are only using this data to connect a person with some kind of mutual connection, such as going to the same university. The larger opportunity is carrying social matches based on like-minded individuals across marketplaces.

These multifaceted sources of reputation will not be a single algorithm: we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.

"We are only at day one in the whole idea of global reputation," Chesky says. "There really could one day be this reputation economy that allows us to do so many different activities that we can't even imagine right now."

By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)

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