Trust Never Sleeps
But let's return to the world of software and look at some of the complex ways in which trust comes into play in Web 2.0 businesses.
Trust is very immediate in the ventures that are all about building a community. Members trust that the person who seems to be a 14-year-old girl is a 14-year-old girl.
Trust is essential in monetary transactions and technologies for ensuring that kind of trust are well established. But when a Web 2.0 business embodies its own economy, as Second Life does, it needs some sort of gold standard to justify trust in its currency and business transactions. Business transactions, whether carried out in Eurobucks or Second Life's Lindner Dollars, live in a less trusting, more Gesellschaft world.
Highly focused online communities like Daily Kos, the biggest political site on the Web, are more like the Gemeinschaft model. Trust among members comes more readily, and conversations assume many shared values. Businesses, like Reuters, are opening in Second Life, but they are having to learn how to behave. Early on, they could get away with cute cartoon avatars, but now they have to adapt to the prevailing mores: Advertising and commercial self-promotion are accepted, but only if done in a way that reflects the standards and style of the community.
In probably all Web 2.0 businesses, but especially in media-centric ones, recommendations are a means of adding a layer of value to the interactions. Celebrity playlists, Amazon customer reviews, and eBay's rating of sellers are different kinds of recommendation systems. But note how they differ: One provides a list of product recommendations from a presumably trusted source, one provides many random richly detailed reviews of one product, and the third accumulates random ratings to produce a score.
What about reviewers of reviewers? An article posted on Digg can accumulate a lot of "diggs" (recommendations), which just means that it's popular, not that it's accurate. But Digg also lets recommenders recommend recommenders. Does this layering of one recommendation system on top of another cause something better than any of the individuals' opinions to emerge?
In part because of the value of others' opinions, social connectivity itself can have value. LinkedIn is a business social bookmarking service that lets you tie into the contacts of your contacts. One of the benefits of this, apparently, is the ability to see a potential sales prospect in a social context, providing a richer picture of a person you've only met online.
For true Gemeinschaft models, enabling trust may be no more than a matter of keeping people out who aren't on the same page through trollrating and unrecommending, and in extreme cases, outright banning.
