ab_initio

Awesome. Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if you (or anyone) think it would be more fruitful to take a holistic approach i.e. factor in ebay, twitter, HN and create an overall score, or stick with a simpler, more streamlined karma counter type thing that would be "widgetable". Or does the latter necessarily lead to the former?

Joshu - Thanks for the comment. Curious as to what exactly you mean by "cut the idea to the very minimal core to see how small you can make it, and see if you can validate that minimal concept." Are we talking about hashing out some specific feature and then seeing if that, on its own, will be successful? I guess, if you could explain a little about what you mean by "validating a concept," it would make things more clear to me.

Thanks

You can buy the naming rights for 1m whuffie

I think thats certainly an issue. Right off the top of my head I see two distinct paths by which one might drive adoption:

1) There are a variety of smaller sites that utilize reputation type systems. For examples, take a look at all those tech help sites (one called it exchange comes to mind). These all fit into the Question/Answer model. I think there is some merit to exploring blogging as a second option. Specifically blogs can use reputation threshholds for posting, filtering, and comment prioritizing (putting the good ones at the top). Basically those are the primary areas where I'd like to look to start building a user base, but I think there are many more out there.

2) As one commenter recommended, the service could be expanded to include more than just simple +/- karma type scores and move to more complex stuff like Kiva loanability etc. This is pretty self explanatory, add a service that makes life easier for these sites, and they'll ask their users to adopt it.

Finally, I realize openid is a different beast but it boils down to similar idea, universalize your identity. Login and passwords are, of course, prevalent everywhere, so there is a huge market for this type of service and it seems to be picking up some steam. Our target market is smaller, but if it proves nearly as useful to users within that space, it has a chance of being adopted as well.

Thanks for your comment. As for your arguments, I am somewhat unconvinced.

1) This is impossible. What exactly is impossible? Getting Digg and Reddit to adopt it? Maybe, but there are a variety of uses that I can think of that have nothing to do with digg reddit or HN.

2) This has been tried before. So what?

3) Twitter and Facebook do this already or something similar. So what? First of all, both facebook and twitter have totally different business models and really have no incentive to include reputation. Further, the mere fact that there exists a large competitor in the market doesn't mean a small venture that may be more simple, targeted, and agile cannot succeed.

Maybe I am being naive, and if so, I fully expect to hear about it. However, I find your arguments unconvincing, and I would be greatful to hear other people's thoughts on them.

Thanks again for the comment.