Online systems that collect trust information from users

Sites where it is possible to download the input data for trust metrics

 * See also which are the TrustMetricInputOutput

Requirements:

Real users expressing trust statements on other users (such as friend lists, web of trust, web of distrust, real values of trust in other users, ...) (optionally) Real users expressing rating trastments on items (ratings on movies, books, songs, jokes, ..., list of preferred/hated items, ...)


 * http://del.icio.us
 * couchsurfing
 * www.hospitalityclub.org/
 * songbuddy
 * audioscrobbler
 * http://mouthshut.com/ similar to epinions.com

Scriptlance
every user (developer) can rate the other users (developers)

https://www.scriptlance.com/cgi-bin/freelancers/feedback.cgi?p=matrixweb

for every project (created by an user) all the user can offer a bid

http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/1073663188.shtml

allconsuming [downloaded] http://www.allconsuming.net
Description:

"A script visits newly updated weblogs hourly via Weblogs.com. The script then looks for links to Amazon.com items and saves them. I then aggregate all that information together to find the most frequently mentioned books. My scoring mechanism is weighted to favor recently mentioned books, so that the list remains fresh, and offers new insight into what the weblog community is reading at the moment.

All product information is stored on my server after being retrieved from Amazon.com. Likewise, information from Google is also saved for a day before being retrieved again.

Sign up to create a list of books you're currently reading, have read, or plan to read. You can also make a list of your favorite books. Just recently I added instructions on how to include a small snippet of javascript on their site to always feature the books they're reading.

This is just the beginning. As data accumulates, I'll be increasing the feature set so that people will eventually be able to receive personalized lists of books that are being read by your friends... and your friends' friends, and your friends' friends' friends, etc.

XML? RSS? We cache most of our content in xml and rss, so have a look through this directory for a list of available feeds. Archived feeds are kept here. As I continue to work on this site, one thing I'd like to do is make the xml a little more presentable... but most people that know what to do with xml probably won't care too much about the presentation. So there you go. Do something interesting.

Pros:

XML, RSS feeds available. Developers encouraged to create services whit this data.

There are trust statements ("Jane is my books friend") and rating statements ("I'm reading SmartMobs", "I'm rereading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom")

Cons:

The statements are not expressed as real number values: user can just be friends (1) or nothing; books can be in one of the lists (currently_reading, favorite_books, rereading, ...)

There are almost 1000 users but many of them didn't provide statements.

citeseer [downloaded] http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/researchindex.html
Description:

"ResearchIndex indexes Postscript and PDF research articles on the Web". It provides a pretty complete web of citations among scientific papers; for every paper, it provides the list of citing papers and cited papers.

Pros:

Recommending papers and other researchers to researchers surely can find an audience among

Cons:

Citing someone work does not mean necessarily trust in the author.

This is an old field (sociometric, citation analysis) in which the trust information is not present and cannot exploit its power.

advogato [downloaded] http://www.advogato.org/mission.html
Description:

"Advogato is a community site for free software developers. It also serves as a research testbed for my research on group trust metrics for peer certification. The other major focus of this site is a peer certification system. The members of this site certify each other, specifying one of three skill levels. Then, I've got a trust metric  that takes the whole pile of certificates and decides a trust level for each member. What makes the system interesting is that it's attack resistant."

Pros:

Expressely designed for trust metrics. Many users (list here http://www.advogato.org/person/)

Cons:

Trust statements have a 3-values level. There are no rating statements.

epinions http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/show_~faq_wot
Description:

"What is the Web of Trust? Your Web of Trust is a network of reviewers whose reviews and ratings you have consistently found to be valuable. The Web of Trust mimics the way people share word-of-mouth advice every day. Friends have a proven track record. If a friend consistently gives you good advice, you're likely to believe that person's suggestions in the future. You know which preferences you and your friend share. If you both like the same types of films, you're more likely to trust your friend's recommendations on what to see."

Pros:

Many users

Users express web of distrust! (but it's kept private and not shown on web site)

Cons:

livejournal http://www.livejournal.com
http://hacks.ciphergoth.org/livejournal/ljdp/proposal.html

Description:

"LiveJournal.com is a free service that allows you to create and customize your very own "live journal": a journal that you keep online! "

You can also edit your list of online LiveJournal friends to track from your LiveJournal friends page.

See also statistics

Pros:

Friends are real friends in LiveJournal, people you care about and you often know in the physical world, while in the blogosphere, you often have never met your "friends"

from http://www.touchgraph.com/TG_LJ_Browser.html: "LiveJournal's Statistics page indicates that there are over 100,000 hosted weblogs updated daily, making LiveJournal the largest structured networked community online. The magnitude of the LiveJournal userbase combined with its democratic distribution of links makes it a perfect case study for visualization. LiveJournal allows one to discern small user communities because its concept of "friendship" differs from the standard weblog blogroll. Non-LJ weblogs mix links to friends with links to A-list weblogs which they read, but with which they do not have a dialog. Most LiveJournal friendships on the other hand are two-way, meaning that one can track networks of communication rather then attention. One can compare the subtle interconnections between the cliques that can be seen with the TG LJ Browser to the much bulkier clusters between general weblogs on the TG powered Blogstreet Visual Neighborhood While the former form small groups around many of the diverse LiveJournal Interests, the later form large groups around a few main stream topics such as design, technology, politics, and law. "

Cons:

Download: there is a perl script to download it http://www.steve.org.uk/ljfm/ljf.txt but you should be logged in.

Tribes, Plaxo, Linkedin, Movabletype V3
from http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/2004-February/012681.html

- Tribes has been telling people they're going to export FOAF. - Livejournal has a patch in and could go live at any time. - Plaxo, Spoke and Linkedin are sniffing round the problem. - It seems highly likely that MT V3 will include the FOAF generation code from Typepad.

blogosphere
Description:

Pros:

Cons:

technorati, http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/dataset.php (we know of 219095 blogs. we have fetched 133908 and 17128 are in the blacklist -- 68059 have never been downloaded.) weblogs.com blo.gs

cocoa in future!
Description:

Pros:

Cons:

eachmovie or movielens?
Description:

Pros:

Cons:

friendster
Description:

Pros:

Cons:

http://www.washedashore.com/people/friendster/

Bookcrossing
Description:

People release books they like (sometimes rate books but i think it is not common). people express their friends

Pros:

Cons:

couch surfing
http://www.couchsurfing.com/

www.dooyoo.it ?
see http://www.dooyoo.it/user/178353.html

livejournal
trust = ?

ratings = ?

Kazaa
trust = ?

ratings = ?

gnutella
trust = ?

ratings = ?

edonkey/emule
trust = ?

ratings = ?

Jabber
trust = ?

ratings = ?

Trillian
trust = ?

ratings = ?

ICQUniverse
trust = ?

ratings = ?

yahoo
trust = ?

ratings = ?

SourceForge http://www.sourceforge.net
Description:

There was an attempt to add in sourceforge the possibility for users to rate other users. It seems it failed.

SOURCEFORGE PEER RATINGS SYSTEM announce http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/PeerRatingSystem, the project http://sourceforge.net/projects/sfpeerratings/

Pros:

Cons:

PGP Web of Trust
Description:

A number of analyses of and tools related to the PGP Web of Trust, including pgpstat, keyanalyze, PathServer and Pathfinder, are referenced at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/pgpstat/

Pros: hundreds of thousands of trust ratings, by relativley savvy and security-conscious individuals, with snapshots since 1996 and periodic analysis.

Cons: Only choice is "My key signs your key"

= other lists =

http://trust.mindswap.org/cgi-bin/relationshipTable.cgi

http://trust.mindswap.org/nets.html

http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/6832739961761474/

inside http://groups.yahoo.com/group/trustcomp/

= something else =

-

just show every single past interaction with some sums / "you can get your idea from this"
 * 1) affero
 * 2) global
 * 3) ebay
 * 4) global
 * 5) epinions
 * 6) global

Slashdot uses a set of semi-randomly picked moderators who can give karma points (both positive and negative) to posts. One problem that regularly appears is people posting under names similar to a highly-regarded name to confuse the moderators. A system of authentication and pet names could alleviate this problem...
 * 1) slashdot
 * 2) global

A social network explorer, based on weblog interlinking data collected by Phil Pearson. start from your blogroll and propagate few steps. http://diveintomark.org/projects/recommended_reading/ pretty simple but with python code
 * 1) Recommended Reading

compute blogrank based on inbound/outbound links, but i didn't find code or specification of algo.
 * 1) feedster
 * 2) http://www.daypop.com/blogrank/


 * 1) kuro5hin (similar to slashdot.org)
 * 2) global
 * 3) not used

only 6th level monks can moderate! ;-) http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=5938
 * 1) perlmonk.org

1) ebay [yahoo auction, amazon, epinions, ...] GOAL: establish trust among unknown possible traders - every buyer can express a rating (+1, 0, -1) and a textual comment on the seller after every real transaction - every seller can express a rating (+1, 0, -1) and a textual comment on the buyer after every real transaction - every user can see the sum of of all the ratings, the ratings and the comments for every uiser PRODUCE: 3 global values for evry user (sum of past ratings over past week, past months, past 6 months)
 * 1) existing virtual systems
 * 1) existing virtual systems

2) slashdot (kuro5in.org is similar) GOAL: keep low the moise/signal ratio - every registered user can post articles and comments - every registered user can (sometime, picked at random) rates the articles and comments - every reader can filter out articles and comments under a settable threshold Who can rate? logged in user; regular, long time readers; positive karma contributors. When? randomly in time, you get assigned 10 points to rate comments, the points last 3 days. PRODUCE: - a global value for every comment (representing its read worthiness) - a global value for every contributor (representing its read worthiness, i.e. her reputation) as sum of past moderations on her comments; it is also the starting level of every her new post.

3) Blogosphere - every peer expresses the other blogs she reads/values/trusts (the blogroll!) many services use this info: daypop.com, weblogs.com, technorati, ...

4) Affero GOAL: facilitate the founding of open source projects, attach reputations to persons across communities - every person can rate another person's contribution (in mailing lists, on sites, on blogs, ...) based on usefulness of her contribution (to help solve a problem, to carry on an interesting open source project, ...) - every person can also make payments on behalf of a person (if she was useful) to the beneficiaries she has chosen (amnesty, fsf, eff...) - individuals can share reputations across various communities PRODUCE: a global list of top 10 volunteers, top 10 patrons (they pay!), top 10 beneficiaries; it is global.

5) edonkey, gnutella: GOAL: keep out malicious peers, misrupters and leeches - every peer keeps a trust value on every other peer (depending on downloaded files/uploaded files and quality of downloaded files) - every peer can prioritize peer with subjective high reputation - every peer can exchange reputation values with other peers (!!!) PRODUCE: a SUBJECTIVE, LOCAL trust value for every peer in every peer!!! http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/526236.html



Favorite People Your Favorite People list is a group of other Amazon.com shoppers, friends, and favorite reviewers that you like and trust. If one of those people has created an About You area, or if you know that person's e-mail address, add him or her to your Favorite People list. Then, whenever one of your Favorite People writes a review, or comes up with an interesting recommendation, we'll put it on your customized Friends &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Favorite home page. That way, you can keep track of people and opinions that matter. Amazon Friends An Amazon Friend (formerly Trusted Friend) is a person who has permission to see a private view of your About You area. This private view can include personal information like name or e-mail and items from your list of Shared Purchases. Amazon Friends appear in your Favorite People list with a star icon next to their name.
 * 1) Amazon has data about trust/reputation

http://www.epinions.com/help/faq/show_~faq_wot What is the Web of Trust?
 * 1) epinions
 * Web of Trust is a network of reviewers whose reviews and ratings you have consistently found to be valuable.
 * The Web of Trust mimics the way people share word-of-mouth advice every day. Friends have a proven track record. If a friend consistently gives you good advice, you're likely to believe that person's suggestions in the future.
 * You know which preferences you and your friend share. If you both like the same types of films, you're more likely to trust your friend's recommendations on what to see.


 * Amazon,
 * Sourceforge (peerRatingSystem)
 * Slashdot,
 * Kuro5hin,
 * Affero,
 * A trust-aware p2p network (edonkey, gnutella)
 * bibserv
 * orkut
 * this ones? http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/6832739961761474/

SocialNetworksSites Web of TrustSimplistic