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Building Whuffie
Reputation and the
Future of the Social
Web
Kevin Lawver | Music
Intelligence Solutions
Monday, November 9, 2009

A Brief History of
Whuffie
• The concept was laid
out in Cory Doctorow’s
novel Down and Out
in the Magic
Kingdom
• Basically, whuffie is a
currency based on
reputation.
• Geeks were fascinated...

Whuffie Explained
• Whuffie is based on your interactions with
others, and your actions that benefit or
hurt the community.
• You can see where others’ whuffie comes
from:
• right-handed whuffie comes from
groups you agree with.
• left-handed whuffie comes from
groups you don’t.

How does whuffie
apply to community?
• Real-world currency isn’t the currency of
most online communities.
• They usually do center around reputation,
even if it’s not quantified
• Why not calculate it and use it to recognize
your best users?

Today’s Communities
• Most communities on the web center
around a primary social object.
• That social object is the source of
reputation.
• Secondary, yet useful, actions aren’t
rewarded.
• Single-source reputations (Digg) are easily
gamed.

Practical Limitations
• Whuffie doesn’t travel. It’s local to the
community actions happen in.
• Good reputations may inform other
communities, but your reputation won’t
map onto a new community.
• Left and Right-handed whuffie is too
complex to implement today (for me
anyway).

Case Study: Flickr

Community Actions
•Taking and uploading photos
• commenting
• tagging
• creating galleries, sets & adding photos to
groups
• favoriting
• geotagging

Which actions get
rewarded and are
encouraged?

Taking pictures...

and that’s it.

But what would happen
if they rewarded other
behavior?

Rewarding Good
Feedback
• What if Flickr rewarded people for posting
comments?
• Adding tags?
• Geotagging photos?

You’d get better
comments, tags and
locations for photos;

which would encourage
photographers...

... to upload more photos...

...creating a virtuous
cycle!

BuildingYour Own
Reputation System

How to Build a
Reputation System
• Catalogue your system’s actions.
• Assign positive and negative values.
• Then watch the stream and assign values to
the objects and users as they “flow” by.
• Reward good behavior, discourage bad.
• Find and showcase your “best” content.

A Sample Whuffie
Chart
• Post a photo: 25
• Comment on a photo: 15
• Have a comment deleted: -10
• Tag your own photo: 5
• Tag someone else’s photo: 7
• Have your tag deleted: -3

Gaming the System
• Automated reputation based on multiple
actions is harder to game than user-
initiated reputation.
• Think about Digg.All they have are votes. If
you can infer reputation based on how the
community reacts to an object, you don’t
need them to vote.

Rewarding Unsung
Heroes
• You can look at different angles of your
reputation events and reward the “best” in
your community at support activities
(commenting, tagging, etc).
• Users feel more rewarded for behavior
helpful to the community and are then
more likely to continue doing it.

Reputation Systems in
the Wild
• All of the major e-mail services have a
reputation system in place for stopping
spam - but they don’t really reward good
behavior.
• Flickr’s Interestingness is a reputation
system applied only to primary social
objects.
• Ficly has one, but most results aren’t
surfaced yet.

Warnings
• Active communities produce a lot of
reputation events. Calculating reputations
for everything can take a long time.
• As you grow, you may need to prune
actions you watch, or delay calculating
reputations for older objects/actions.
• Negative actions should have less impact
than positive.
• Beware precipitous falls or rises and cap
them (if needed).

The Future of Whuffie
• Someone (probably Google) will build a
reputation clearing house with an open API.
• The sites already gathering reputation data
will open it up, scaring the hell out of the
unsuspecting masses.
• Someone will crack left and right-handed
whuffie, giving us a much better idea of
who we’re dealing with on first contact.

Further Reading
•Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom by Cory Doctorow (obviously)
•The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt

Questions?

And now a word from
our sponsor...

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If you’re an awesome...
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Thank you!

Contact Info
• Old school: kevin@uplaya.com
• New school: @kplawver
• Work: http://uplaya.com
• Blog: http://lawver.net

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