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Ask HN: Is eBay-style Feedback for the World a Startup Idea?

1 points by tomcampbell ↗ HN
A few years ago I blew my life savings, retirement fund, and the kids' diaper money on a self-funded Craigslist competitor. (Kidding about the diaper money. Mostly.) Over a million dollars down the drain.

Part of its USP was that you bought and sold only with registered users, and there was to be a feedback system so both buyer and seller could feel a bit safer. That feedback system would appear roughly similar to eBay's, though far richer.

It had global ambitions and would cover more than eBay's does. For example, it would have name verification like Amazon and would even obtain credit rating information from anyone willing to give it up (this would make more information for sellers, obviously). At least one elegant algorithm was involved, but we were dealing with old media as our distribution mechanism and they didn't get new media.

<p>The idea of developing and maintaining a solid online identity with different views of trustworthiness makes sense to me. I don't know if it's a good idea for a startup, because the field may already be crowded for this very idea. Has this been done a thousand times before, by people Michael Arrington actually likes, or does it actually stand out a little?

3 comments

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jgoodleaf
This idea has been around in science fiction for a while. Note especially Charlie Stross' "Accelerando" and its worldwide reputation markets. You're talking about a reputation server of sorts.

It's an excellent idea and actually marketable I think. But reputation servers would need to be highly interconnectable and data needs to be easy to migrate. I wonder if diaspora + openid would get us more than halfway there...

tomcampbell
Diaspora won't because it doesn't emphasize reputation stats. OpenID doesn't either. OpenID is good for a site knowing you can log in, but not for knowing whether the last 3 times you sold something you didn't follow through, or that the last 6 times you bought things you paid promptly. I had somehow missed "Accelerando" and like Stross, so thanks for that one.
jgoodleaf
Accelerando is freely downloadable. Google it. (It's a legit copy, not pirated.)

It's not high art. Like most Stross books, the writing is uneven and the character development is close to nil. But the ideas are breathtaking, and make the book worth a look.

I meant, by the way, that diaspora might provide a good platform on which to build reputation, and OpenID might provide the means to uniquely identify a single human so that a reputation can follow him or her around. But I don't know much about either project, so I could be wrong.