Reputation

Identity and Reputation are two recent, loosely related issues that have been generating a fair bit of airtime recently on Google+.  Though it's Google's new social network that seems to be generating much of the noise at the moment, these concepts apply equally to other social networks and, indeed, to people in all manner of online and offline activities.

Anonymity, pseudonymity and a person's legal name: these aspects of Identity are being heatedly debated as the NymWars rage across the internet.  Here, however, we'll focus on the related issue of Reputation.

Reputation can be considered to have two main aspects: history, and notoriety.

- History: Is this some form of persistent identity (here or elsewhere).  Good for removing spammers / flyby posters.  Bad for young Johnny who finds the internet a wasteland for the first 12 months after logging on.
- Notoriety: Is this worth paying attention to.  Rather like pagerank on search.  Good for finding out who's worth listening to when looking for new contacts or sources of information.  Bad for finding new talent as top accumulators continue to accumulate yet more contacts and draw the eyeballs.

It's worth noting that whilst the first aspect ofeputation discussed above - History - looks to be about Identity, it is merely closely related.  A person who is anonymous has no history by definition, but those who use legal names and pseudonyms merely have the potential for history but may not in practice, young Johnny being the case in point.  With History you don't care who the person is (even in the disembodied sense): you are merely observing some enduring existence.

There is the side issue for point two that's sometimes raised, that perhaps a single Notoriety score is insufficient to capture the multiple aspects of one person.  For example, should Francis Crick receive a single rating, or separate ones for discussion of cellular development, abiogenesis and photography?  Having a single score would be relatively easy and automatable (lots of people follow and comment on Gandhi, Gandhi follows and frequently comments on Fred Blogs, so Fred Blogs rates very high) whereas separate scores would, I imagine, be difficult.  And perhaps not useful - Oprah may not have specific qualifications, but if she mentions books or movies there would be a lot of interested people because of her overall Notoriety.
Notoriety on topics could be tweaked once posts start incorporating tags.

Whilst the two aspects of Reputation above have no formal embodiment on G+, they do already have some primitive exposure on G+ and other networks.
For example, there are many high-profile G+ users that enable you to see their followers (or have them tracked elsewhere), thus enabling lists of Top G+ users to be created and browsed.  Many of these high profile users are high profile because they share lots of quality content, though there are also many that do not share any at all.  I've certainly used such lists in the past to find interesting people to follow.
As for history, that of the user on the specific network is viewable by clicking through to a user profile.  Of course, this is limited to the public post history, thus revealing at least a minimum existence.  However, when engaged in discussion on a forum / group it can be worth a moment to take a look at whether this user - with a potentially real looking name - has actually been active for more than the last 24 hours.  Pyro temporal identities are usually a sign that the argument is not worth pursuing.  A user that's been around for months is at least likely to still be there when you log in tomorrow.

As rudimentary as these facilities are, they at least give users today some ability to make decisions based on the Reputation of their network peers.  As for how G+ and other social networks can build on what's available and provide richer decision-making data?  Well, this post is already too long, so I'll leave that for another day.  Or an exercise for the reader ...