When the Internet was nothing more than a tool to post blocks of text, and the easiest way to communicate over it was by firing up AOL and opening AIM, the idea of reputation online was little more than that — an idea.

Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Technorati, Last.fm, Wikipedia etc…etc… In less than an hour I can learn anything about you, from your favorite food to who you are dating. Our reputations and our identities have been disaggregated, and now the question becomes, what are we planning to do about it?

A Case Study

Open up Techmeme today and you’ll see that 2008 Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani had a bit of an embarrassing moment when it was discovered that his daughter supported Barack Obama in the coming election. This discovery was made by Slate using the daughter’s Facebook profile. Yesterday, the New York Times used a combination of blogs and old fashioned sleuthing to uncover the identity of Fake Steve Jobs.

Reputation Managers

What is clear is that our online identities are as important today as our offline ones were in the past, and considering how difficult it is to trace down all the treads that bind your online persona — it is substantially harder to manage.

If you want to know what the next big industry to come out of the latter days of Web 2.0 will be, look no further than reputation management. Robert Scoble has spoken about how interesting it would be to hire someone to handle blog comments, and Jason Calacanis seems to be in need of someone to manage his Facebook account.

Reputation Managers will be the brand managers for a world where the idea of branding has been extended to include groups ranging from popular bloggers to MySpace celebrities. Software needs to, and will be developed to search for the threads of your online identity and present it to you in a way that will allow you to take action on it.

When I open up my mailbox in the morning, I want to know what is going on around my identity. Am I being mentioned somewhere in the media? Has my social network expanded substantially? Do I just have more Facebook friend requests than usual? As employers, mass media and the world at large increasingly use social networks to keep tabs on people of interest — these personalities will need efficient ways to keep track of it all.

The person who can fill this need with an accurate, easy to use product will reap a world of benefits.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Already companies like ZoomInfo, Spock and Wink are trying to aggregate information online into meaningful profiles, but these engines are designed to be social search engines not reputation managers. They do not provide meaningful, actionable data. All they can do is compile information and hope that users interpret it appropriately. It’s this interpretation layer that is missing and what an interesting world it will be when some company manages to find it.

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