E-reputation toolkit: Social Web Metasearch

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The Socal Web is fantastic if it is built on top of social relations in the real world. Somebody discribed it ironically: "Twitter is for the friends you want to have while Facebook is for the friends you have had." I have no experience with Twitter, but research demonstrated that  Twitter is not a social network. About Facebook, Myspace... and alike, I can be positive, they are an extra channel for multimedia exchange. For some social Webs are the photo-book we had before... for the activists it's the place where they launche petitions.

A few years ago there was much ado about the long tail, a statistic concept from consumer demographics to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. A frequency distribution with a long tail has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group that purchases a large number of "non-hit" items is the demographic called the Long Tail.

The Long Tail might be valid for sites like Amazon and Ebay, it doesn't work in social networking. After all social relations are not built on consumer demographics. Maybe the popularity of politicians might work this way, but in politics today, nobody has real friends. So?  A study of Youtube showed that the long tail doesn't work on the social web. The popularity of videos on Yuotube follows rather the  blockbuster model. Based on the viewing habits of people I know that go to YouTube, this makes sense.  Many simply check out whatever is most popular, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.  Desaster tourism works the same way, people slowing down on the highway if there has been an accident. So, beware! It is passing. Once the mess is cleaned, nobody will be looking any longer.

In the real world 'trust building' gives stable results when one invests time, while a reputation is shallow and passing. Trust building' is a process that takes time. One has to give evidence of this truthfulness and trustworthiness, it's about quality. But on Internet things seem to be different. PR based reputation building seems to work all the time. It suffices to get in the picture without getting in jail and that's about it.  But keep in mind, it's about quantity and a self-perpetuating cycle, not about quality.

The tools I list here cost nothing. Look at them, but if you use them, keep in mind that long standing relations are built on trust not on reputation and that relations in the real world are not interchangeable.