The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services. The higher your reputation, the wealthier you are.
I really like this Whuffie Bank initiative, it looks well implemented and easy to use. It may one day help people like myself and others who share their knowledge online. The fact that retweets automatically count in building up your reputation, and does lighten personal efforts, is a great start for building in automated mechanisms.
I joined here, and gave my first 3 whuffies to Glyn Moody, Carolina Botero and Trebor Scholz, as they were listed in the retweet overview.
“It’s a sad fact of life that many of the most insightful and helpful people on the web (and in real life, for that matter) aren’t financially rewarded for their efforts — they may well be satisfied with the good they’ve done, but that doesn’t help to pay the rent. The Whuffie Bank, a new non-profit organization that’s launching today at TechCrunch50, wants to fix this by launching a new currency that rewards people for their positive contributions on the web.
The startup is hoping to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency. The service will monitor your activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more. When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. The company hopes that as we use the web more and more in our day-to-day life this positivity will extend beyond the web.
To get started you enter your username on Twitter (Facebook support will be coming). The site displays how many Whuffies you have, along with a graph of your progress over time. The site ranks its users by Whuffies, in the hopes of helping surface the top users in different fields.
The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted. You can make offers to other users using Whuffies as payment (for example, I could ask someone to help me draw a logo, offering 100 Whuffies as payment).”
I’d love to say these guys are offering something new but they really aren’t. It’s just another popularity contest. What they say they’ll do and what their algorithm does are totally different. The premise is great but their implementation sucks. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next….