Trust is everything

Absolutely everything we do successfully is built on trust. The lesser the trust the greater the risk and likelihood of failure. Trust a matter of rights and responsibilities for each player. Every balanced contract will ensuring each party's rights and responsibilities clearly down on paper. Except that words are not enough to define trust, so what is written tends to be protection against the negatives, and hardly ever the positive. The positive is left to the imagination in that far more eloquent ether of the imagination.

eBay has an interesting take on trust. If you go into a shop and complain about something you can shout to the top of your voice. You can write a letter or talk to the owner. You can write to a newspaper.

Who hears your complaint? Which of those might be influential shoppers interested in the same product or service as yourself? Probably only a very small percentage hear or read. As soon as you are out of the shop the shop can continue business as if you had never happened. The chances of many relevant people reading a newspaper article about your problem is a chance in a thousand.

No so with eBay. When you buy or sell something on eBay every single purchaser or buyer has the quick and easy ability to see whether to trust you or not. They can do this with the most relevant information possible - recent purchases and sales.

And this is very powerful and is so easy to use that it is used by almost every shopper or seller. And there are many eBay'ers who go further and refuse to sell or buy from people who do not have a high trust rating!

My "better half" has recently got into eBay and is extremely proud of her 100% rating to date. She looks forward to that rating being enhanced. How can you get better than 100%? With that percentage is a concept of track record. In eBay this is measured in stars. Stars provide a measure of history, of depth to someone's quality. Add that to the percentage and you have very quick and metrics that are so easily understood.

eBay is not unique in this system. epinions.com is another interesting example. At epinions you rate not only products and services but people who comment. After that the result is very similar to eBay. Direct access to something that could not be enshrined in words in contractual form, no matter what your skill level as a wordsmith.

Such Internet based systems are a new trust paradigm. That is that you cannot get away from who you are and your record is easily accessible by the people who matter.

But with eBay and Epinions you can escape. With most web technologies you can escape. You can restart with yet another E-mail address. You can easily start over with a new identity.

With Groove you cannot so easily restart. In fact it is almost impossible to restart. Your identity is tied to an account. Your account is fixed, enshrined and bound to you and your digital signature.

Yes you can start a new account - but then you break with your Groove history and the new trust rating is almost zero on any new account. And you aren't going anywhere until your trust level grows.

Trust ratings in Groove are based on consistency. Consistency of a very soft thing - provable dialogue. These are intangible assets but very powerful ones. Everything you say and do in Groove is stamped by date and account.

The trust model is extended by space membership. By being in "a space" other space members assume you are bona-fide. Again this is a very soft measure of trust, but very powerful.

If and that is a big IF, someone should compromise your Groove account and do a bit of identity theft, yes they could steal the information that is available to you at that instant. But to spoof you, your phrases, your computer manner is an almost inconceivable thing.

And that is what makes Groove different. And that is why Bill "trustworthy computing" Gates is acquiring Groove.