Who do you trust?

[DuaneJackson]

Originally Posted by FlyingCards

Prober Industrial Ltd. leou@prober.cn
This is my agent in China I can vouch for him 100%
http://honestasia.en.ec21.com/company_info.html
Paul

I just saw this post from Paul and emailed someone I know that might find it useful with the details saying someone I trust 90% (established forum member but never done business with) is recommending this guy saying he trusts him 100%

It got me thinking, if you put all your contacts in a databse along with trust levels, and I put mine in, along with a trust level for you, then I could seach for anyone in any industry and get an idea of how much I should trust them dependant on the trust level between me and you and you and the supplier.

A good idea for a site or a crap one?

[cjd]

It's quite interesting and a little similar to the ebay rating scheme. Obviously open to abuse with 'ringing'.

[compuclean]

But wouldn't your level of trust differ to mine? You see, you may not have had bad experiences with someone, but I may have, and may not trust him. So who gets to decide what the 'trust level' is, and can that be amended?

[DuaneJackson]

The trust level is on a one-to-one basis.

If I trust you 10% and you trust John 80% then I trust John 8%

However if Colin trusts you 90% then he would trust John 72%

Or something like that

If there are multiple paths to John through my contacts then an evergae rating could be calculated, along with a breakdown of how it was calculated.

[amo crafts]

A good idea IMO but with caveats.

I may be cynical but I do wonder how many people are willing to give out their suppliers to their competitors. Though this site does seem to be more forthcoming in that regard than many.

You would need to only allow pre-trusted members to enter details. Otherwise you'll have every scam artist and his dog posting details of their 'company'. Although you may have a 0% trust of that member, the database may soon fill up with spam.

You'll need something like the amazon review summary, using your trust level as the weight before taking the average.

AVG( SUM( their_trust * your_trust )) ? or something along those lines. Okay, okay, syntactically wrong but you get the idea.

[DuaneJackson]

Good points. The ideal way would be to have it as invite-only. Which then begs the question of how you would monetise it.

[Free Line Rental]

Sounds a great idea.

How many of us have paid for credit reports....... only to do the deal and get stung.

If your idea could be managed on a subscription basis it would stop spammers and provide real time info.

Already working on the site for this lol

[creospace]

It's much like a recomendation site really or personal recomendation with having to get a recomendation if you know what i mean.

As for trust, well generally I trust everyone %50 when I first meet them then it builds or decreases as the relationship, other things influence it like if someone I trust puts in touch with them I almost instantly trust them 75% or more from the start and so on. Never judge a book by it's cover either way.

[An Oasis]

An interesting idea for a website, I think the question is who trusts the trusters, if you see what I mean.



Case study


This lot http://www.118trades.com/

Keep pestering us, to become members. They got hit a while back by BBC’s rougue traders for not checking references, which was one of their supposed USP’s.

After that. This appeared, check at the top left of the screen. That’s right that meant to make you think it’s all above board.

Because http://www.verificationassociation.org/ check the checkers right?

Interesting that the same bloke owns both companies.

[Gillie]

Trust with what though Duane?? Your life, your kids or your money??

Its a very subjective thing so why then not just ask people to give a recommendation and how and when they have used the service/person and as on ebay and various other places, rate them according to various levels of service etc