This didn’t really belong in that last post, especially after I added other stuff. So aren’t you lucky? You get another one!
A while back, I noticed that an old post in which I had published my Opinity ID badge in order to claim this blog had broken links. I checked their site and found a notice saying that they’d be back up in two days.
Well, after several months, that notice was still up. Unless they’re talking about something like Plutonian days,1And no, I didn’t look up the exact length of a Plutonian “day.” It’s a joke, son! I think they’ve missed their target.
So when I looked up Zooomr at CrunchBase earlier, I thought, “Hey, maybe they can tell me about Opinity!” They had zero information—not so much as a summary or description. There was just a listing with the name of an “advisor,” I think they called him.
But! Then I ran a search since I hadn’t done so in a while. And lo and behold, I found an Information Week article from June 2007 that says that Opinity ran out of money before its concept caught on. The CEO went to work for Google.2They have their fingers in everything else, so maybe they’ll come up with something similar in the future.
Opinity seemed the best of three systems that all started around the same time (or that I became aware of around the same time, anyway). ClaimID is still around, and, um, I don’t remember the other one. Oh! iKarma! Rapleaf came later, I think.
I liked the fact that Opinity verified each thing you claimed. If you said you were such-and-such a user at eBay, Yahoo!, LiveJournal, ICQ, etc. you had to have access to that account to get through the verification process. I don’t think Rapleaf, ClaimID, or iKarma do that with anything but email addresses. I think it was iKarma that also had odd limitations on how many items you could add to your profile and some significant omissions in their listings. If you have too much of an online presence, you just can’t get it all in on iKarma. And if you use services they don’t choose to list, tough luck. They do have a link for suggesting new sites, but I’ve never received a response to suggestions that they add ICQ, Google Talk, and other services.
Trufina has a different concept in some ways and does actually check information against various databases. You have to pay to have more than the most basic check done on you, but their prices are reasonable. I just saw something on their blog about working with LinkedIn, which seems very interesting.
Do you use any of these reputation management sites? If you screen new employee candidates, do you research them online? How? How much weight do you put on what you find there? Would recommendations or ratings from such sites matter to you at all?
I like your footnotes. I’m gonna have to get me some of those
I like them too 🙂 I use the Dahnielson Footnotes plugin to create them.