Goofing around with TrustCloud

While looking into trust marks and online reputation platforms, my latest fascination and potential inspiration for what’s next for Kabissa, I came across TrustCloud (http://www.trustcloud.com) which I can imagine having the potential to really make a difference for people who do not have credit cards and otherwise might have trouble convincing others they are who they say they are and should be trusted.

TrustCloud is a startup that provides, currently for free, a web interface for quickly and easily setting up an account that lets you “claim your trustworthy online data” and then use it “anywhere” using a so-called “TrustCard”. I went through the process and within a few minutes verified myself via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and eBay, as well as my email addresses, mobile phone (sms code) and mailing address (postcard with code to come in the mail).

TrustCloud gives you a score measured against what it calls “existential”, “behavioral” and “transactional” measurements. Both the score and actions you (and your contacts) can take to improve your score are displayed on your dashboard in a simple, very streamlined interface. They calculate your score via the networks you connect your account to and what you do over there (e.g. Facebook posts, ebay purchases and reviews). You can then use your TrustCard to show your reputation in everything you do – by linking to it as you would to your other online profiles (mine is at https://trustcloud.com/!/tobiaseigen), showing a widget on your blog (mine is at http://saidia.org on the right), in your email signature, in your Craigslist postings (I tried this out on a post selling a Roomba), etc. Below are some screenshots.

TrustCloud also has an API which would hint at the possibility that it’s possible to, for example, add functionality to community platforms like Kabissa to enable Kabissa members to add their TrustCard to their Kabissa account which would then be displayed on their profile page and blog posts. Since Kabissa uses Drupal, this would probably be fairly trivial to set up as a module.

All of this would be helpful for any online community, if TrustCloud takes off that is. Right now it’s hard to tell how far TrustCloud is and I haven’t seen anyone I know using it. As is often the case for startups like this, the target audience seems to be less civil society organizations working at the grassroots in Africa and more consumers in  the United States trying to save money on services and stuff they need by using peer to peer social platforms like craigslist.org, airbnb.com, couchsurfing.org etc.