Ebay has made a jillion dollars using a seller recommendation system based on 1995 technology. KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, was definitely the way to go for such a large and popular site.
TechCrunch says Rapleaf has created a full open version of eBay’s feedback system, which will launch in May. Read the article for more details. Rapleaf blog.
Rapleaf will allow anyone to leave feedback for anyone they’ve transacted with. Others can use this feedback to help them determine if they are doing business with someone who’d likely to engage in fraud. Rapleaf is eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world.
Open API’s, mashups, all good stuff for developers looking to integrate RapLeaf with their services.
I’ve been waiting to see this for quite some time. Just goes to show that good ideas can be churned out quickly and relatively inexpensively these days. So many companies spend too much time thinking about concepts, plans and vision and less time delivering usable/beta service. RapLeaf makes other reputation and identity management companies seem glacial by comparison and they are in a position to land-grab potential market share if the product is any good.
Opinity, iKarma, Trufina, and other vendors in the reputation and identity management space have their work cut out for them. They have spent a lot of time and money working on entire identity ecosystems while scrappy groups like ClaimID have been churning out the pieces and parts in a few months.
There is a lot of new and exciting stuff coming in the identity and reputation management space. How dating companies leverage the emerging opportunities remains to be seen.
Technorati Tags: ebay, identity, reputation+management, rapleaf
