Tag Archives: social software

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Social software and the problem of trust

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Although you don’t hear about it much, trust is an extremely important issue in the software world.  A common example is eBay – how could eBay stay in business if millions of anonymous buyers and sellers didn’t have a certain level of trust?

Andy Brice, a software developer, gives a really interesting example of the problem of trust in his blog.  He became concerned that his software products were getting a ridiculous number of awards and 5-star ratings from shareware download sites.  He devised an experiment: if you create a text file, change the file extension to .exe, and submit it to 700 download sites, how many award would you get?

It turns out you would get tons of awards.  A large percentage of these sites, which ostensibly provide users the service of evaluating shareware and freeware, are in reality just trying to skim adwords revenue.

Social software, if applied correctly with enough participation, can help to solve this problem.  It is much harder to fake 1000 del.icio.us bookmarks than it is to make an authoritative-looking award banner.

Many of us work on projects internal to companies where we don’t confront these issues directly on a day-to-day basis.  Large companies can generate billions of pages of documents and code each year.  Add to that the billions of external web pages we use as reference material.  Tools such as social bookmarking can help build up this network of trust and sift through the less useful resources even on intranets.

So now that we have the tools available, all we need is participation.  You’re reading this, so I’m probably already preaching to the choir.  Trust is a really interesting issue, though, so I’ll be writing about it here and there in the future.

The iPhone, Google Maps for Mobile, and e911 – where is the disconnect?

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DSCN0592Google Maps for Mobile will soon include a GPS-like ability to find your current location.  A little while ago Gizmondo wrote about an iPhone hack that allows almost, but not quite GPS functionality.  The hack itself sounds a lot like the way phase II of the wireless E911 service works, and my guess is that Google Maps is fairly similar.

If you take a look at this map, you can see than many states have > 80% deployment.  On the FCC site you can find reports of the e911 deployments completed by cell phone companies.  Any company that doesn’t have over 95% of their customers with E911 capable handsets is currently getting fined.  So it’s a shame that Google and random iPhone hackers have to reimplement all this.

I’ve never worked on E911 support (or anything cellular, for that matter), but it seems to me there is an incredible opportunity here.  One of the great things about the iPhone is that it drives adoption of data plans.  How about including psuedo-GPS capability in nearly every phone as soon as you sign up for a data plan?  That would be a huge incentive.

Here’s an even more radical idea:  why not come up with a standard way to communicate presence and location data so users can do things like local search?  It might take use years and millions of dollars to develop proprietary systems to do this, but if we use an open standard perhaps this could be adopted as quickly as things like the web and email.

Even better, operating under an open standard will allow geeks in garages all over the world to develop new social software systems we can’t even dream of.