Listen to the March 26, 2012 show!
How do you prove your identity and whether or not you can be trusted to people you have never met?
This week we had a chance to sit down and talk with Drummond Reed, one of the founders of Connect.me. This program is groundbreaking and will be such an asset to the online world.
Drummond and his company have tackled one of the biggest problems with the internet head on: trustworthiness. How do you prove your identity and whether or not you can be trusted to people you have never met? This problem stares at us everywhere, from connecting to people on social media, to debating if you can trust a seller on Craigslist. Connect.me is an answer to this problem on a large scale.
To begin constructing a solution, Drummond actually helped write a document called the ‘Respect Trust Framework‘, which helps tackle the problem in the social media area. Connect.me takes these considerations and developed a four tier system of trust built into a voucher system.
In order to join Connect.me you must have a LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter account (they are working on including Google+). You will receive a card with the opportunity to add six tags, which are words or phrases to describe you and what you do. The user gets the final say in which tags they would like to use, but connections can suggest tags for you by vouching for you in those areas. You will then get the opportunity to decide if you want to have those tags be visible. People will be able to vouch for you for a specific tag. For example, Lori has ‘speaker’ as a tag, and twenty five people have thus far have vouched for her as a speaker.
Now how do you know if you can trust the vouches? That is where the four tier system comes into play. When you join, you are at level one, unverified. In order to move to level two, verified, you must have another way to establish your online identiy (aside from the social media account you used to set up the account) and have given ten vouches and received three. To get to level three, you need 25 vouches for different people. Level four is unique, you become a trust anchor. To reach this level you need three different trust anchors to vouch for you as a trust anchor. These are people you know are obeying the trust framework. They only have one account and they vouch honestly. Lori has actually been selected as one of the ‘founding trust anchors’.
Now Connect.me is still in private beta form, and they have an extremely long wait list to join. If you do not know anyone already on the platform, Drummond has said go to the site, set up an account, and then email the username to requests@connect.me and you can get a little special treatment compliments of the LinkedIn Rockstars. How cool is that?
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