Online Reputations

Caught this post by Michael Arrington, lead writer for Techcrunch over the weekend.

It’s a quick blog about an upcoming launch of start up company (unnamed) that will be entering the “yelp for people” space. There is no mention of business model or if the site will be using their traffic for some lead generation system.

The article outlines some companies that have tried this but have failed in the past: iKarma and Rapleaf. Apparently this new company has something more compelling and fail proof. The quick gist: your “friends”, co-workers and random acquaintances have the ability to “review” you as a person. Made any mistakes in college? Caught on camera once in high school drinking a beer? Piss someone off in your workplace or rec basketball league? Well it might make it back to bite you in the ass more so than it ever should.

I’m curious to pick the brains of the founders/management teams, where is the market in this? How does this change perceptions of internet use and privacy? Is the site solving a meaningful problem? Is there a way to control your “profile”? I’m also curious what sort of venture capital investment these guys have if any and if they do what are their investors like as people?

In the age of instant gratification and internet everything ,where does society draw the line? Why is it ok for someone to post negative “reviews” of you? I can only imagine the devastation this will have on high school age teens where reputations and being popular mean so much. There won’t be any policing of school bully’s posting false “reviews” of the dorky kid in the corner. This is one more reason for people to cowardly hide behind their computers, leaving human interaction and face to face constructive confrontation in the past.