{"id":89,"date":"2007-11-30T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2007-11-30T17:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2007\/social-software-and-the-problem-of-trust\/"},"modified":"2007-11-28T21:06:43","modified_gmt":"2007-11-29T02:06:43","slug":"social-software-and-the-problem-of-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2007\/social-software-and-the-problem-of-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Social software and the problem of trust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although you don&#8217;t hear about it much, trust is an extremely important issue in the software world.\u00a0 A common example is eBay &#8211; how could eBay stay in business if millions of anonymous buyers and sellers didn&#8217;t have a certain level of trust?<\/p>\n<p>Andy Brice, a software developer, <a href=\"http:\/\/successfulsoftware.net\/2007\/08\/16\/the-software-awards-scam\/\">gives a really interesting example of the problem of trust in his blog<\/a>.\u00a0 He became concerned that his software products were getting a ridiculous number of awards and 5-star ratings from shareware download sites.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n<p>It turns out you would get tons of awards.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>Social software, if applied correctly with enough participation, can help to solve this problem.\u00a0 It is much harder to fake 1000 <a href=\"http:\/\/del.icio.us\/iamjason\">del.icio.us bookmarks<\/a> than it is to make an authoritative-looking award banner.<\/p>\n<p>Many of us work on projects internal to companies where we don&#8217;t confront these issues directly on a day-to-day basis.\u00a0 Large companies can generate billions of pages of documents and code each year.\u00a0 Add to that the billions of external web pages we use as reference material.\u00a0 Tools such as social bookmarking can help build up this network of trust and sift through the less useful resources even on intranets.<\/p>\n<p>So now that we have the tools available, all we need is participation.\u00a0 You&#8217;re reading this, so I&#8217;m probably already preaching to the choir.\u00a0 Trust is a really interesting issue, though, so I&#8217;ll be writing about it here and there in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although you don&#8217;t hear about it much, trust is an extremely important issue in the software world.\u00a0 A common example is eBay &#8211; how could eBay stay in business if millions of anonymous buyers and sellers didn&#8217;t have a certain level of trust? Andy Brice, a software developer, gives a really interesting example of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[141,30,140,107,103,95],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-freeware","tag-intranets","tag-shareware","tag-social-software","tag-social-bookmarking","tag-trust"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}