IDNTITI Provides Democratic Reputation Management
by Bill Ives
Here is a new reputation management service that provides users with a platform to rate people, companies and products in a social networking environment by ranking their identity and reputation. I spoke with Sreedhar (Sree) Unnamatla, CEO and Founder of IDNTITI. Sree said that IDNTITI is pronounced “identity”. There are many reputation monitoring tools (see Top Web Reputation Tracking Providers from Mashable) and many rating sites, as well as many other sites that have a rating component.
The biggest differentiation in IDNTITI from other rating sites is that the parameters being rated are user generated. Therefore, it becomes a highly democratic rating system with no custodian restricting feedback that user wishes to provide. Sree said within the new web “you are (on the web) what people say you are” and not “what you think you are,” despite the positioning you might do.
On IDNTITI, anyone can start a rating page for a company, a product, a movie, a restaurant, etc. You do have to identify your relationship to the organization or subject you are rating. A suggested set of attributes are offered, depending on what is being rated, but you can add more attributes. Here is sample page rating Intel. You see many one to ten ratings which helps with the analytics.
I asked Sree about how they handled the potential for rater fraud. He said they have a user authenticity module that catches and deletes all unauthenticated users. The data used in the analytics is from authentic users only and therefore the possibility of fraud and fictitious user data is reduced. Authentication of a user happens using multiple filters – both technology & process based. You have 60 days to be authenticated or your ratings will be removed.
The pages allow for customized analytics as you can choose a subset of attributes to use for your own evaluation. You can also look at the demographics of the raters and sort the ratings by these demographics, looking at any subset of raters. Users can re-compute scores of an entity, based on the selected demographics or ratings by their community members (people similar to the user who the user selects). All ratings can be seen through graphs and charts.
They have started a series of templates for different types of things to rate such as the restaurant template below.
IDNTITI also allows you to start a rating page for yourself. In this case the ratings are only accessible to yourself and to those that you give access. The ratings of companies and products are always public. The personal rating page allows you to get ratings on both personal and business issues. Here is a sample personal rating page.
The service is free to research on ratings, but registration and sign in is required to contribute which is all for free and drilling deeper into self reputation data requires a $1 a month fee. IDNTITI scores are sharable (with a custom widget) among friends on today’s leading social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. They have also started an IDNTITI blog to provide more context. I think they have a good niche here.
