Why topsy is going to kick all sorts of ass | Hacker News Reader

Why topsy is going to kick all sorts of ass

aditya.sublucid.com

18 pointsaditya15 comments

> Topsy is the first real implementation of a large scale reputation network for the general public.

What if you never have, don't now, and never intend to "Tweet"?

I think in their TC video they talked about adding new data sources including your blog, and your facebook feed etc.

That is a tough question for every repnet out there though, what about people that don't have a digital footprint. Maybe topsy will start indexing the real world too, at some point ;)

Hmm. I don't tweet, blog, FaceBook, MySpace, or anything else like that. I contribute to various fora. Will that count, I wonder.

Perhaps people will become invisible if they don't participate in any of these "social media" activities. The world will belong to the ego-centric, narcissistic, I-can-shout-louder-than-you generation.

In the news and broadcast media insight is being lost in the tsunami of attention-grabbing, 10-seconds-at-a-time sensationalism.

Is this good? Does it matter? Is it inevitable?

Should I get a blog and moan about it?

"The world will belong to the ego-centric, narcissistic, I-can-shout-louder-than-you generation."

Not to get too philosophical here, but I'm pretty sure the world has always belonged to this group of people in each generation. Or at least it has appeared to since they're loader than everyone else.

I think the issue is that the people you should really pay attention to, aren't out there self promoting. They're busy. You have to go seek them out. So I'm not sure how well this will really work.

"If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound"?

I think this is definitely a big problem that topsy or any other reputation based system will have to work around but if you're busy building amazing stuff, at some point you will be recognized, by getting lots of users talking about you, or people writing about you, etc.

What makes topsy different is that the people behind it have been thinking about it for a while. From one of their previous projects:

CODD is a tool for creating and analyzing statistical measures of "developer involvement" in free software projects. By assimilating authorship attribution information included in source files of a package, CODD approximates the the amount of individual contributions from developers who constructed the codebase. CODD also provides many tools for analysis of the attribution data. CODD was used in the First Orbiten Free Software Survey. It has since been extended for International Institute of Infonomics that uses CODD in open source research.

via: http://vipul.net/code.html

You miss out

Yeah - how will you know when Ashton and Demi go to Arby's?

What is Arby's?

Fast food joint.

Yeah, yeah, funny - but what might be more interesting is the degree of gender-neutrality of the names "Ashton" and "Demi".

I feel like the author has a different definition of "reputation" as myself.

It's almost a vector vs. scalar issue ... to me, reputation can be sizable but it can also be positive or negative. This (so far) sounds more like "popularity".

Just because someone [has 10k followers]/[gets re-tweeted 10x/day]/[has 5k FB friends] doesn't mean I'm going to loan you money or I want my daughter dating you ...

I think you have it nailed. Reputation can not generally be quantified outside closed systems such as eBay.

I like it, however, if it becomes popular, people will try to game it. Wonder what that will do to Twitter, and how to deal with it.

Popego.com does something similar, but for a newsfeed instead of search.

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