One Million Dollars
For Gesellschaft models, the techniques for engineering trust are more complicated: Google's PageRank algorithm. The algorithm Digg uses for ratings. The NetFlix recommendation algorithm.
This last one demonstrates how important this stuff is. NetFlix munges customer ratings of movies to come up with movie recommendations. It's the same kind of thing Amazon does when it tries to tell you that, based on your past purchases, you might be interested in Marc Levinson's The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. The algorithm doesn't always work well.
Which is why NetFlix is offering the NetFlix Challenge: A $1 million prize to anyone who can improve their algorithm by 10 percent.
The builders of Wikipedia took the gamble that opening their content to public editing could give them the world's best encyclopedia. The jury is not yet in, but the evidence seems to be that the concept is almost right, but needs a little tweaking to protect against abuse.
After getting the algorithms right, perhaps, and finding the right community, abuse of trust is the big issue for many Web 2.0 ventures. Wikipedia had its bogus entries, a California politician found that he had some unsavory "friends" he'd never met on his MySpace page, those folks at Daily Kos tried an experiment in Googlebombing just before the election, Second Life has (and needs) its virtual police. But many of the problems of abuse of trust experienced by Web 2.0 ventures and the members of their communities probably have technological solutions.
Then there's the matter of trust between Web 2.0 ventures and your opportunity to make money off this phenomenon.
The COO of MySpace got quite testy recently about other people leveraging off MySpace's strengths. Other Web 2.0 ventures are more embracing of such actions. According to Tim O'Reilly, the ability to leverage off these ventures, in the form of creating alternate interfaces or creating new services by linking services of different Web 2.0 ventures, is part of what Web 2.0 is. Digg generates previews of YouTube videos; integrating Google maps into other apps is a biggie now; JotSpot, a Wiki business just gobbled up by Google, has or had a network of developers who were customizing and extending JotSpot's services.
The ability to leverage the services of different Web 2.0 ventures could provide a lot of opportunities for developers to create clever new tools. And if that doesn't work out, there's always the NetFlix Challenge.
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Ward Cunningham on Trust
Ward Cunningham invented the Wiki and pioneered Extreme Programming and Design Patterns.
DDJ: When you came up with the idea of WikiWikiWeb, did you envision it being used for anything on the scale of Wikipedia? Or were you thinking of smaller, more focused collaborations?
WC: Yes, I recognized that Wiki had positive scaling properties, though I did not imagine them applied to encyclopedias. I thought that it could capture and even accelerate culture. I was interested to know how much it would need to be extended to facilitate communication between different languages and cultures. The answer, Wikipedia shows, is not much.
DDJ: Letting anyone contribute and even change others' contributions requires a certain level of trust and maybe of shared values or interests. Is the Wiki model more appropriate for some online groups than for others?
WC: You are right that communities using Wiki must share values. Trust is a more personal thing and develops over time. Wiki has shown that it is possible to trust a community in much the same way that we trust a person. And when the community disappoints, that trust evaporates in the same way.
DDJ: A lot of attention is paid to security in academic and professional computer science, but we seem to be in an earlier stage of understanding when it comes to the related topic of trust. At least there are cases, like Wikipedia, where we are discovering that our intuitions about trust may be wrong. What thoughts have your experience led you to regarding trust in collaborative environments?
WC: Trust is a well-studied phenomena, though perhaps not so often in computer science. Practical system builders should understand that trust is built through observation and that behavioral visibility is the machinery that makes trust possible online. |
