stoweboyd and the /messengers

I heard Santiago Siri present at the Techcrunch 50 event a month or so ago, and I thought that his WhuffieBank project would be a good fit with the Future Of Money series.

The project is an ambitious one: it seeks to quantify connection and to derive a monetary value from it. Or as it says at the website:

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.

It’s in the same spirit of Creative Commons, an
organization that’s changing the contract between our ideas and us; we
want to build an open organization that aims to measure and enable the
exchange of online reputation.

The value of your Whuffie is obtained from your online reputation by tracking your interactions with social networks and the feedback from your contacts.

At this time, it seems like Whuffiebank just calculates a monthly 'salary' of 'whuffies' based on by whom and how often you are being retweeted. Here's my page:

The interview:

Some highlights:

• Santiago borrowed 'whuffie' as an organizing principle for the service from Cory Doctorow, based on the blurring of social capital and 'whuffie' (also called 'karma' or 'swarmth').


• His goal is to develop a standard way to measure reputation across all communities and social networks.


• His interest isn't fictional, but to dig into systems like Twitter to measure influence, and shape that into a currency that can be exchanged.


• An example, how would WhuffieBank interact with people's lives? Imagine Tom has dedicated his life to the study of Borges. Within that context, Tom would be rated very highly. Others could find Tom who is an expert in that field. Others could use their whuffie to get Tom's advice or contribution to a project.


• I argued that mixing social interaction with financial interests causes problems.


• I pointed out that this system has all the problems that Digg has encountered with gaming of reputation.

The card:

I have not seen anyone doing it, but whuffie can be passed around through Twitter like this "WHF # @username", as in "WHF 10 @santisiri" or through the app. Note: I have not been able to get it to work for me, but it's probably me. Also, I would have liked to see a more general approach to currency exchange employed, but that's a microsyntax detail.

I wonder whether this will turn out to be more than an experiment. I'll have to revisit this in a few months.

The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org