People Review

I have some thoughts today. There are so many things online available that allows you to review a buyer and seller (ebay.com),  a business (BBB, Yelp, Angie’s list, insider pages, and thousands of others), a product (epinions, sharedreviews, and others product review sites). What about people reviews?

Everyone one of us have lots of information about the people around us, from your classmates in school, your relatives, your co-workers, your boss, or your senators. You have an opinion about each of them.

The nerd who everyone doesn’t want to talk to in school, maybe actually someone different from what people have told you. He is humorous, smart, and care about his friends.

The introvert co-worker of yours is one of the best software programmer you have ever met, he is the first and only person you need to consult if you are stuck on a problem. And you always feel bad when he doesn’t have all the credits he deserves?

It works the same way as reviewing a product, or a business. It is just reviewing people that you have first hand experience with.

There are lots of buzz words online, some call it reputation management, some call it reputation graph, some call it social graph 2.0. To me, I would just coin it the term People Review, in consistent with Product Review, Business Review.

There are a few challenges need to resolve for people review

1. Is is personal – The “thing” you are reviewing is (in most cases) a perfectly sane human being, which clearly has feeling. So people are either overly positive about a review because they “try” to be nice. Or they intend to crush someone they hate with overly negative reviews.  Most of human being are the same, they don’t really know how to handle confrontations so they try to avoid. Look at the degraded references and reviews on Linkedin.com, they are all super glowing positive. I have known a few people who has glowing “king of java”, “painting queen” reviews are not really that good.
2. Bullying. Human being are group animals, they tend to team up to bully people. Look at the school bullying stories. If there is a people reviewing system, one of the challenges is to make sure people don’t abuse the system and bully other people.
3. Why people wants to review others? I personally don’t have much interests reviewing all my co-worker or relatives. If I like their works, I will be willing to be their work references. If he/she is my relative, obvious my opinion is biased because of the blood relation. Or I just over hate them.

These are just 3 tops of my head, I am going to think more about this during my vacation. But I do believe that People Review is tough and won’t be easy.