Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges
kabadge.com
kabadge.com
The system is based on the email addresses you used with the services you use. You can claim multiple addresses and manage them as a single profile. Another important feature is that the service does not require user registration to benefit from it. For example, StackOverflow.com might decide that you earned the 'Teacher' badge. They would make a call to our API and say "give youremail@example.com the Teacher badge". Even if we didn’t have that email is our system yet, we would record the action and the owner of that email can claim their badges later. Now when you sign up or use other sites they could place badge requirements upon registration or when trying to access special features. Perhaps all new users must have at least 3 StackoverFlow badges and 2 Twitter badges. Maybe a game forum requires that you have X WoW achievement to post comments. In a way, it becomes a sort of CreditScore for your contributions to other sites.
Also, since blog comment integration seemed like the perfect way to share your profile's URL, the system works similar to Gravatar. By MD5 hashing an email, you are able to link to someone's profile without exposing the email address associated with the page. So when you leave a comment on a blog, the blog engine can hash the email and link to your profile. Now we can all see how awesome you are on the internet.
As you can tell, this isn’t complete. I finished enough to get the idea across and get some feedback. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. I wrote and designed this all myself and I could also use some suggestions on how to take things to the next step. Does it sound like an idea that really needs my full attention and possible VC funding since I depend on partnerships? Is this something you would use? Can other sites and services be bothered to publish this sort of data?
This is my example profile: http://www.kabadge.com/User/Profile/11d39fe94051978a44ce887a...
However, I'm glad I read your explanation here because the site itself tells me very little and without reading your explanation I probably would have shrugged and kept browsing. Put this explanation on your site, and show people an example profile.
You really do have a "chicken and egg" problem trying to get providers to see the value. My two cents would be to write some blog posts on "the reputation currency" and try to get as much attention out of that as you can, getting people excited and enthused (and bumping up your own reputation on the topic). To me that seems like the best way (short of reaching out to many partners) to gain some traction.
Good luck!
It's hard enough to get users to sign up for my stuff, let alone make them sign up for something else. Throwing in additional roadblocks is definitely not the way to go.
That's not to say I'd be against showing the badges they've earned elsewhere. That would be nice, I suppose.
Another problem: If things go very well for you, you'll end up with hundreds of partners all pushing badge info. On the other side, you'll have consuming partners that want to use this data, but they'll need to know exactly what badges to extract. Not every user will have the same badges from the same sites, so the consuming sites have to do the legwork of deciding which badges they want to display.
Further, if site X decides to change their badges, all sites that consume from X will need to change as well, or just keep displaying the now stale data.
Seems like too much communication will be necessary between all the different parties.
A consumer might have to do specific badge checks for restricted sites like the WoW forum example (I agree that I would never use this feature myself, but I can see some value in it), but they would clearly know exactly what they were looking for beforehand.
Publishers: WoW forum, StackOverflow, HotOrNot.com
Consumer (me): Hacker News
As HN, I obviously don't want to display the HotOrNot badges, probably just the SO stuff. So, I set it up to pull those. Not too bad. Now imagine that there are hundreds of producers, some that make sense, and many that dont. You probably have to do a fair amount of digging to find those that make sense for your site, and a lot probably fall into a grey area. Then, you may find that only 1% of your userbase uses any particular 3rd party badge-producer. So you have a choice: include lots of badges, most of which will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of users who see them, or include only the most popular badges, which means the service ends up dominated by a few big producers (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
I guess I'm having difficulty articulating, but I'm just thinking that as someone who runs a community site, I don't want to go digging through dozens of other sites' badges to determine what they mean and if they're applicable to my site. Plus, I don't want to have to re-do this every couple weeks to add any new badges that have appeared in the system. And, the only end result I see is being able to decorate user profiles with bling that is meaningless to the majority of the other users on the site.
Maybe it's because I've never understood the whole "achievement" thing anyway, but I can't come up with a reason to care about them at all. I can't think of a reason to use a system that restricts access only to people with completely arbitrary credentials. I can't think of a reason to implement such a restriction, either.
I can think of a reason NOT to export my application's "badges" to other applications, if any: it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges. It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.
That said, I don't want to be too down on the idea. It's got some potential as an information hub. I would consider losing the "badge"/"achievement" terminology, downplay the "access control" angle, and bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application.
I could see benefit of sharing information about -- say -- how often a user makes posts on user-moderated discussions, as opposed to voting, or that sort of thing. Swapping numbers and ratios instead of boolean data reduces the arbitrariness of the thing. The ability to use them in subtle ways, as opposed to ham-fisted restrictions, would likewise reduce the temptation to create throw-away accounts.
I doubt anyone would make a (non-spam) system that rewards people just for signing up. The site creator would be careful to reward only meaningful actions. So this isn't realistic.
>> It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.
That's the whole point of the badge itself though - encourage a particular type of behavior. I don't see this as a problem either.
>> bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application
Very interesting take on the idea.
For example, HN could have a "1000 Karma" badge, which would be meant to encourage thoughtful, intelligent submissions and posts. People could instead say majority-pleasing things. Even worse, people could collaborate to vote each other's posts up. Get 32 such people together, have each make 32 posts in a topic that left the "New" page without getting any votes, and presto! 1024 Karma for All!
There are many variations on these themes. Badges (in social/multi-user settings) largely fail at getting people to do what you want, unless what you want is for people to waste time getting badges.
Now, in a closed system, this can be minimized: people who would normally read and post on HN are less likely to resort to these shenanagins, and others just wouldn't care. The aggregator gives them a reason to care.
I also think your example of other services limiting behavior depending on badges gained on other sites to be unlikely. From the consumer's perspective, a reputation system has a lot of value in context, but that's very different than saying that my reputation on one site has value on another. From the partner's perspective, I find it unlikely that I would build a site that depends on my audience's behavior on someone else's site.
I don't think these things are deal breakers, you just have to target it a little more precisely. Nice work so far.
Example: there should be a quick fire-and-forget Javascript method to increment a per-user arbitrarily named variable that you keep track of, and then when you exceed some threshold of that, you get a badge. That allows you to use one system to support everything from "Slay 100,000 orcs" to "Print out 75 bingo cards", with negligible work from your API consumers. The fact that it is negligible work creates value whereas your base offering (show that you've slain 100,000 orcs on your teaching bingo site profile! Booyah!) does not.
Other easy things to measure are stickiness (time since registration), collecting all of a set of API calls, etc (For example, in the hosted badge designer, you could say "A Dragonslayer is anyone who submits any [dropdown: two] of the following events: killed-red-dragon, kill-blue-dragon, and kill-green-dragon. Then customer site only has to fire killed-#{monster.name} as appropriate, and boom, dragonslayers.)
This is dangerously tempting to work on. Should I go for it? Perhaps I would need to provide both methods of awarding badges. I dont see StackOverflow.com wanting to re-implement their badge system rules in the KaBadge system.
To that end, you should have your partnering system working as soon as possible. Ideally, it should be as easy as clicking "become a partner" and copy + pasting some simple parametric URLs into your app (or something of that nature). Show someone how easy they can implement badges in less than 5 minutes.
I also agree with one of the other posts here, you should take reputation system management workload off the shoulders of your partners. Right now someone else does all the work and you get the benefit. It would be nice to be able to ping your system every time a user does one action towards the goal of some given goal.
Starts to sound a lot like conversions and goals in Google Analytics, doesn't it?
- What's an achievement? What's a badge?
- How do I earn them? If I want to go off and earn something right now how do I do that?
- Why do I care? What's in it for me?
It's difficult to review something when I have no idea what it is.
(Edit: formatting)
Definitely think working with the partner sites to make the end-user experience as transparent as possible is the way to go. Also want to make it very easy for partners to hook in to your system (e.g., simple API calls around their existing login/event logging process).
This may sound silly, but you want better icons/eye candy for your badges. They should be things you want to collect.
I like your idea though. Keep going.
Very clever. Almost irresistable.
Of course, once you get to the next page and see that you haven't already earned anything, "curious" is replaced by "disappointed".
Doing something like this, you could act as a sort of social network background check, as users would not even need to opt-in to your service, they would automatically be signed up when they join the various sites.