This week, we distill insights around TrustCloud - an online tool that aggregates peoples’ online social and transactional data, crunches it into a TrustScore and creates dynamic TrustCards that people can embed on their social networks. 100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on social data, crowdsourcing, storytelling and citizenship on the MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it -- on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web -- to distill insights and foresights. We share these insights with you on our People’s Insights blog and compile the best insights from the network and the blog in the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities. We have further synthesized the insights to provide foresights for business leaders and changemakers — in the ten-part People’s Insights annual report titled Now & Next: Ten Frontiers for the Future of Engagement, now available as a Kindle eBook. For more, see: http://peopleslab.mslgroup.com/future-of-engagement

1. crowdsourcing | storytelling | citizenship | social data
TrustCloud
People’s Insights Volume 2, Issue 21

2. Volume 2, Issue 21,
April - June, 2013
Future of
Money
TrustCloud
100+ thinkers and planners within
MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring
projects on social data, crowdsourcing,
storytelling and citizenship on the
MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every
week, we pick up one project and curate
the conversations around it — on the
MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but
also on the broader social web — into
a weekly insights report. Every quarter,
we compile these insights, along with
original research and insights from the
MSLGROUP global network, into the
People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine.
We have synthesized the insights from
our year-long endeavor throughout 2012
to provide foresights for business leaders
and changemakers — in the ten-part
People’s Insights Annual Report titled
Now & Next: Ten Frontiers for the Future
of Engagement.
People’s Insights
In 2013, we continue to track inspiring
projects at the intersection of social
data, crowdsourcing, storytelling and
citizenship.
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3. 3
What is TrustCloud?
TrustCloud is an online tool that aggregates
peoples’ online social and transactional
data, crunches it into a TrustScore and
creates dynamic TrustCards that people can
embed on their social networks. People
use TrustCloud to establish their reputation
on their social networks and peer-to-
peer buying, selling, sharing and lending
platforms.
Source: trustcloud.org
TrustCloud likens itself to a FICO score that
measures creditworthiness:
“TrustCloud gives members in the Sharing
Economy the tools for Trust and Accountability
that enable better decision-making and
improves every transaction. We measure your
virtuous online behaviors and transactions to
build a portable TrustScore you can easily use
within the Sharing Economy.”
The need to port reputation
across platforms
The sharing economy has grown immensely
in the last few years, with a large number
of niche P2P platforms, ranging from car-
sharing (BlaBlaCar, Sidecar) and room-
sharing (Airbnb) to pet-sharing (DogVacay).
We cover many of these in our Now &
Next: Future of Engagement report on
Collaborative Consumption.
Most of these platforms have taken steps to
measure and display members’ reputations
based on their past behavior on the platform.
But there is currently no way for members
to port their trustworthiness to other P2P
platforms. Services like TrustCloud strive
to fill this gap, which will only grow as P2P
platforms continue to establish themselves
in the mainstream.
Rachel Botsman, collaborative consumption
evangelist and author of the book “What’s
Yours is Mine,” argues:
“Reputation capital is becoming so important
that it will act as a secondary currency, one that
claims “you can trust me”. It is shaping up as
the cornerstone of the 21st-century economy.
It’s the ancient power of word-of-mouth
meeting the modern forces of the networked
world.”
Source: The currency of the new economy is trust
Craigslist’s Craig Newmark too believes that
people with large reputations will be the
most influential:
“By the end of this decade, power and influence
will shift largely to those people with the best
reputations and trust networks, from people
with money and nominal power”
How TrustCloud works
People sign up for TrustCloud and connect to
their social networks, and profiles on review
sites and Q&A sites. TrustCloud analyzes
their data from these websites and generates
a dynamic TrustScore (out of 1,000), which
updates automatically as more data becomes
available.
Lora Kolodny explains what TrustCloud looks
for:
“Part of the score relates to the consistency
with which people use social networks, how
frequently they transact via peer-to-peer
marketplaces, and what their “star-ratings” are
on sites like eBay.”

4. Volume 2, Issue 21,
April - June, 2013
Future of
Money
TrustCloud
Source: shareable.net
Blogger Paul Smith explains:
“They break it down into three layers: verification, behavior, and transaction.
“The verification layer includes email, physical address and SMS verification. The behavior layer
looks at who you are across social networks in an interesting way … The transaction layer looks at
your ratings on sites such as eBay, Trustcloud’s algorithms sifting out the gamed ratings.”
In addition to past data, TrustCloud also
enables people to ask for endorsements and
to endorse others for various ‘virtues’ like
generosity, accountability and punctuality.
To prevent people from gaming the system,
TrustCloud limits the number of times
people can endorse or +T each other (similar
to LinkedIn endorsements).
Blogger Michael Martine explains:
“You get limited points to spend endorsing the
trustworthiness of others in various categories.
Because the number of points is extremely
limited, you can’t just go around spamming
and trading these with other people in order
to artificially jack up your TrustScore (and
defeating the whole purpose).”
TrustCloud currently lets people connect
networks including Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Google+, Klout, eBay and TripAdvisor,
and will soon support GitHub, Quora, Yelp
and Yahoo! Answers.

5. 5
Source: hosting.ber-art.nl
Trust Cards
TrustCloud lets people display their TrustScore across the web with TrustCards that update
every fifteen minutes to reflect the latest scores.
Lora Kolodny noted:
“TrustCloud users can display their scores with any listings or profiles they create on marketplaces.
Or, they can save the scorecards for use in private email correspondence.”
Source: trustcloud.org
TrustCards feature people’s scores, names,
connected networks and Trust Badges –
badges that depict their area of specialty.
For example, people who are very active on
social network earn the badge Interactive.
Source: slideshare.net/ericaswallow
The list of badges available can guide people
in deciding what they want to be known for,
and also in understanding how to improve
their TrustScore. Several TrustCloud users
have shared that the TrustScore algorithm
places more weight on transactional data
than on social data.
How P2P platforms foster trust
Collaborative consumption platforms have
explored a diverse range of reputation
systems to foster trust within the platform.
Paul Davis wrote:
“The existing reputation systems that
collaborative consumption services have
developed in-house are piecemeal and offer
little portability of user reputation data.
House-sharing services such as Airbnb provide
user feedback rankings and plug into users’
Facebook connections to provide an added
layer of social vetting, while Couchsurfing
verifies identity by through a $25 credit
card verification fee, which is also their
main revenue source. Taskrabbit performs
background checks, while UK-based p2p
lending site Zopa opts for identity and credit
checks.”
The presentation Trust and the Sharing
Economy provides a broad overview of the
types of steps that have been taken.

6. Volume 2, Issue 21,
April - June, 2013
Future of
Money
TrustCloud
Social networks like Facebook (which
requires people to provide their real names)
have contributed greatly to the creation
of reputation systems that rely on identity
verification or social connections. Jeremy
Barton and Rob Boyle, co-founders of the
now defunct reputation system Legit, said:
“On Airbnb, Facebook is used to tell you if your
host went to the same college, or whether a
friend of yours has stayed there before you.
When you sign up for Lyft, you have no option
but to connect with your Facebook account
to provide proof of your identity. Facebook
is a core piece of infrastructure for many
marketplaces as the source of your offline
authenticity and reliability.”
The presentation Just Trust Me: How to
Design Trustworthy Products provides an
in-depth view into the creation of trust in
the virtual world, the challenges faced by
individual platforms and the homogenous
solutions these have resulted in.
Source: slideshare.net/GeneralAssembly_SF
Source: facebook.com/groups/trustcloud
General Assembly also highlights one of the
challenges in simply aggregating data and
porting it to different platforms:
“Brand and context around a rating are
extremely important and you risk losing that if
you merge it into a unified score.”
The evolution of trust and
reputation systems
TrustCloud acknowledges that their method
of aggregating social data and analyzing it
with an algorithm is not a perfect solution,
and is actively collaborating with experts and
users to improve their system.
Xin Chung, Founder & CEO commented:
“TrustCloud is not perfect-- we strive to improve
your experience through research with trust
experts (www.trustedadvisor.com), leading
university sociologists, and our very active
user group (www.facebook.com/groups/
trustcloud). This discussion inspires us to
continue our work to empower peer-to-peer
trust online.”
TrustCloud has also sponsored a series of
posts on Trust and Community on Shareable
to encourage more discussion around the
challenges in creating a portable reputation
system and potential solutions.
For instance, some thinkers believe data
aggregated from social networks is irrelevant
to an individual’s trustworthiness. Blogger
Paul Davis commented:
“Many [reputation systems] prioritize the sort
of accomplishments and metrics that are
primarily relevant in the workplace, which are
not necessarily effective representations of
an individual’s trustworthiness — say, valuing
someone’s networking prowess over real
connections made with other individuals. It
suggests a further mixing of our professional
and personal selves that makes me very
uneasy, and perpetuates a false impression of
the values that make an individual trustworthy.”
Some, like blogger Promod Sharma, believe
that algorithms will play a large part in the
future of trust economy:
“You may skeptical about algorithms but
they already make predictions for you. Google
predicts your search query as you type and
gives results tailored for you. Amazon predicts

7. 7
Source: miicard.com
Source: connect.me
what you may also want to buy. Netflix predicts
what you want to watch (your personalized Top
10) and how much you’ll like a movie (actual
rating vs your projected rating).”
Some, like marketer Sam Fiorella criticize
the endorsement feature of networks like
TrustCloud and LinkedIn:
“There’s no context to the action nor
verification that the person offering the
endorsement is qualified to do so. So what’s
the value, other than to gamify the network to
encourage greater traffic and thus generate
more ad revenue?”
Others, like TrustCloud User Group admin
Berrie Pelser, believe that endorsements are
simply a part of the whole:
“TrustCloud endorsements are meant to
offer additional context to the TrustScore
by providing users looking at your profile
with extra information about you. The
endorsements themselves do not have a
significant influence on your TrustScore.”
Some, like Dimitris Tzortzis, are wary of
the reliance on past online activity and the
impact on people new to P2P platforms and
social networks:
“In 5-10 years there will be many more sharing
networks than now. Let’s imagine lots of
people use them and that we have a trust
currency that we can carry around on the web
to use on P2P transactions. Immediately,
that marginalises those who don’t have
that currency. People who have lived their
lives offline, who have not participated in an
organised sharing network online.”
And some, like Lora Kolodny speculate on
the impact of reputation systems on the
future of insurance:
“A longer-term monetization strategy for
TrustCloud is to become an insurance agent,
as well. Michael K. Crowe, a serial entrepreneur
who sold two Medicare-compliance ventures
to publicly traded insurance companies in the
recent past, has joined TrustCloud’s board.”
Other approaches to foster trust
Several entrepreneurs are working on
solutions to measure trustworthiness,
from aggregating all sorts of data, to only
transactional data, to creating a common API
for all P2P networks.
Blogger Francesca Pick summarized the
state of the reputation space:
“A considerable number of startups and
projects with an array of different promising
approaches to building trust pulled the plug
after several months (or have been very quiet
recently), among them Scaffold, Briiefly,
Peertrust, Project Trust, Truly. Of this first
wave of startups, TrustCloud is in fact the only
company left.”
“Last fall a new wave of startups with
interesting approaches to the topic emerged:
Credport maps your social relationships,
Fidbacks summarizes all your ratings in one
place (without using social networks at all) and
Virtrue offers enterprises and p2p marketplaces
verifications for their users.”
Other startups include MiiCard (video), an
online identity verification service for online
banking, shopping and dating, and Connect.
me (video), a platform that aggregates social
activity and relies heavily on endorsements.

8. People’s Lab is MSLGROUP’s proprietary
crowdsourcing platform and approach that
helps organizations tap into people’s insights for
innovation, storytelling and change.
The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform
helps organizations build and nurture public
or private, web or mobile, hosted or white
label communities around four pre-configured
application areas: Expertise Request Network,
Innovation Challenge Network, Research &
Insights Network and Contest & Activation
Network. Our community and gaming features
encourage people to share rich content, vote/
comment on other people’s content and
collaborate to find innovative solutions.
The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform
and approach forms the core of our distinctive
insights and foresight approach, which consists
of four elements: organic conversation analysis,
MSLGROUP’s own insight communities, client-
specific insights communities, and ethnographic
deep dives into these communities. The People’s
Insights Quarterly Magazines showcase our
capability in crowdsourcing and analyzing
insights from conversations and communities.
People’s Lab:
Crowdsourcing Innovation & Insights
Learn more about us at:
peopleslab.mslgroup.com | twitter.com/peopleslab

9. For People’s Lab solutions, contact
pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com