Small review - Opinity
The Helpalot project is about finding charities you like and can trust. How do you know if you can trust someone online? Opinity is a website that’s trying to give an answer to this question.
First let’s quote the site to explain what Opinity does:
“1. Why should I use the Opinity service? What are the benefits?
Using Opinity’s services, you can build a trustworthy identity that can easily be communicated to others online. Your Opinity Reputation Profile can contain a rich portrait of who you are, what you have done, and what others think about you. You can choose to have your information verified. You can verify ownership of online identities, blogs, and even book authorship. In the near future, you will also be able to verify the details of your education, work background, and other elements of your personal history. Note that this process is under your control. You choose what information to give and verify. Also, through reading other Opinity users’ profiles, you can find out about others before you interact with them online or offline. And if you have already had an experience with someone, either online or offline, you can write a review and let others know about your experience with that person.”
They offer a solution to the fragmentation of your digital identity, where you have to rebuild your trust and credibility on every new site you join. Is this a problem that needs to be solved? Yes, but not for everyone. In my case it might be useful, I’m now joining a large amount of social network sites for my research. In most cases you are probably using a couple of these sites for a longer time and don’t have any problems using them.
You might have the problem of having to log-in on all these different websites and like something to centralize this process. But Opinity will be another one of those sites you have to log-in. This leads to the main disadvantage of Opinity; it takes a lot of time to set it up.
Still I think it’s a good idea and they might become really successful. I don’t use E-bay myself, but I when I would, I’d love to know a little bit more about the the person I’m buying from. For Helpalot I think it would be a good idea if you could easily connect to (a site like) Opinity.
They are in Beta and their site needs some small fixes to make the use a bit more smooth. They where not able to check every site I have a page on, they didn’t even let me claim my Hyves or Frappr page without verification. Still, it has potential, so I’ll keep it in the back of my mind.
You can take a look at my profile over here: