Trustflow trust metric

From TrustLet, a free, collaborative project for collecting and analyzing information about trust metrics.

TrustFlow is a local trust metric proposed by Paul Crowley (aka ciphergoth) in a livejournal blog post. It works on unweighted trust statements.

It uses juice, buckets and pipes as metaphores for trust, nodes and trust statements. Each user starts with a virtual bucket into which "trust juice" is poured; all buckets have one litre capacity, and they all start out empty. Trust juice pours from heaven into the bucket of the trust root. After one litre has been poured, this bucket is full to overflowing; when it starts to overflow, gutters around the edge of the bucket carry the trust juice in equal quantity to the buckets of all their friends. For this is reason it is possibly easy to explain and understand also for final users.

Each user starts with a virtual bucket into which "trust juice" is poured; all buckets have one litre capacity, and they all start out empty. Trust juice pours from heaven into the bucket of the trust root. After one litre has been poured, this bucket is full to overflowing; when it starts to overflow, gutters around the edge of the bucket carry the trust juice in equal quantity to the buckets of all their friends.

It was tested on LiveJournal social network and ignited some discussions, especially on the LiveJournal Trustmetrics group.