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During a conversation with Michael Bazeley at the San Jose Mercury News about reputation management I learned about Opinity. Part TrueDater, part Trufina and Verified Person and a dash of E-pinions and Amazon reviews, at first glance Opinity looks like a promising reputation management service.
Snip:
Founded in 2002, Opinity is the first online personal reputation services company. Based in San Jose, California, the company’s management team has 40 years of combined experience in high technology. Wongyu Ted Cho, chief executive officer, and Doyon Kim, chief product officer, founded successful Internet start-ups Dialpad Communications and Serome Technology, growing large-scale web services from inception to acquisition.
It’s not the first by a longshot but the most recent player in a space that has never caught on for a variety of reasons. One being marketing. This site has been around for 3 years and this is the first we have heard of it?
Services offered include Reputation Reports, Reviews, ID Verification and Reputation Management. A thorough review will come later, my initial reaction is that this service is going to catch on big, especially if they put together partnerships that make sense. Most standalone rep management sites go it alone with Google Ads providing the revenue. Opinity is similar, however I bet they will land deals with a few dating sites blog networks and from there it will take off.
As I have mentiond before, most of these sites are full of complainers. How many women are going to go on a bad date and then seek out a site on the internet to vent their frustration that a guy was fatter than his picture? There is not enough value to the members of the site with this simple complaint system.
Finding out if your date is married or an ax murderer, $24.95. finding out that they are really a fat slob, priceless, and I mean priceless. How can you charge for that information?
On the other hand, If you go on a great date, are you actually going to let the whole world know what a great kisser they are?
Opinity is not just for dating sites, which is a good thing. Things start to get interesting when blogs are brought into your reputation stream. I wasn’t able to add my Technorati ID or my blog here at Corante but I hope they add this option soon.
40,000 new blogs are created every day, thats a nice stream of new users.
Opinity addresses the adjudication process with a service called 2nd Chance. Trying to use the page resulted in various Javascript errors and general browser issues which I take it will be fixed. More on this after I’ve had a chance to upset a few friends and get reported to the service.
The site has tabbed panes for managing your various aliases, reviews, statistics and other panels from which you add your personas.
Read the user agreement to see how ambiguous the TOS are, just look at the loopholes. There is no possible way they can enforce these rules.
(3) The posting contains personal identifying information such as names and phone numbers of other users;
(4) The posting is not the type of posting for which the Web Site is intended, which is as a forum for rating other internet users;
(5) The user who authored the posting submitted false contact information during the registration process and Opinity is unable to contact the user;
(6) The posting references an user who does not exist;
(8) The posting was made by an immediate family member of the user being reviewed;
(9) The posting contains email communications between any parties;
(12) Opinity is presented with a settlement agreement, resolving a dispute between the user authoring the posting and any third party(ies) complaining about the posting, mandating that the posting be removed; or
(13) A user complains about and counters the information contained in a posting, and Opinity believes there is adequate evidence that such posting is inaccurate, false or fraudulent.
I added my Match.com account first. You are validated by providing your login and password. I was unable to validate my account but that could be a password issue on my part. Here are a few screenshots of various pages on the site. Go check it out yourself, add your profile and see how the system reacts.
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Blog reactions
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Bill Washburn (Check me out!)
// May 25, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Dave–
Thanks for spending the time to get clear about a variety of the issues Opinity faces right now. Just one minor point - Opinity actually only got started working on the reputation management service in 2004.
We certainly aim to do the right thing by end users and to do everything above board in service to users directly as we all understand more exactly just how valuable digital identity and reputation management is when using the Internet.
Ultimately we hope to follow the dictum from the world of ethics which basically holds that the first step in resolving any question about right and wrong, good and bad is to get all the facts accurately out in the open. In the world of people and policy, online dating and digital identity, accurate reputation information has to do, most crucially with knowing the facts.
In terms of blogs, we are definitely wanting to get up to speed and in a position to help bloggers as the community of individual on the Internet who are stimulating such significant innovations and with growing energy and visibility. We are hoping to get into conversations with as many bloggers and blogosphere companies as we can in the next few weeks and months.
Sorry about your experience with 2nd Chance. It is being fixed, indeed. We don’t intend for the TOS to be ambiguous at all. Our belief had been - until you brought our attention back to it - that our language was effectively conveying the standard rules. We’ll look at redoing them to conform to best rules form. We are working at present to rectify the very difficulties you have pin pointed.