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One of the on going discussions I have had for years revolves around the Internet as a reputation system. One of the reasons that I have been successful working the internet since 1994 is that the majority of my clients are happy with my work and they tell their friends, other websites pick up on my success and link to me, search engines determine that I am an authority on certain subjects, people join my network in linked in, etc.

This works fairly well, however with open systems it could work much better if more systems were opened up.

Take ebay for instance. It would be fantastic if I could integrate my ebay feedback score ( 100% with 195 transactions over the last 12 months ) with the rest of my online reputation. If there was an open system so I could ask my clients to comment and leave feedback and that feedback would go into the same system as my ebay feedback it would give a much better picture of JTk’s reputation. Combine that with my linked in testimonials, other blog posts about me, my amazon profile, other web 2.0 type sites, etc. and you get a good picture of my online reputation.

Of course ebay is a closed system ( and therefore old school interweb ) so you have to screen scrape if you wanted to do anything with it’s data and they will probably sure you if you do. But it would be excellent if people coming to my site to do business with me could see comments from my ebay feedback like:

• great service and product
• Great ebayer, great product and service.
• Great seller fast shipping works great A++++
• EXCEPTIONAL COURTEOUS PERSON. S_M-O-O-T-H TRANSACTION
• good guy

But alas I had to cut and paste these and they won’t be integrated with other sources of opinions about me, nor will they be updated. So, I am wondering if open systems such as all of the 2.0 services popping up are the future or if these old established services will continue to dominate?

I know that there are services out there that try and act as reputation services, but until the mainstream sites opt in ( or until mainstream users don’t participate in closed systems ) they aren’t very useful. I don’t think it is a technology problem ( couldn’t ebay just give me an RSS feed of my feedback ) but it is a business decision to try and lock in users. With the recent performance of ebay’s stock and the palpable anger of a large segment of ebay power sellers with the recent changes in the terms maybe the auction giant has past it’s peak.