May 7, 2006

Rapleaf is Now Live

Michael Arrington

31 comments »

Rapleaf’s open feedback system (more about it here) went live late Saturday night, and already has hundreds of users who’ve left thousands of feedback posts on others.

CEO Auren Hoffman promises the APIs for the core Rapleaf functions sometime this week, so expect to see Rapleaf mashups very soon. Users can pull their “reputation box” via a code snippet and post it on a website. Mine is below.

My TechCrunch reputation score on Rapleaf is here. As I said before, I believe Rapleaf is going to be a winner if they can close the right business development deals.

Sphere It

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Snipperoo

May 7th, 2006 at 3:26 pm

Zelig » Blog Archive » Golden Week

May 16th, 2006 at 10:14 pm

TechCrunch » Blog Archive » eBay Bans Rapleaf Links

May 17th, 2006 at 6:50 am

Byan Bartow » Blog Archive » TechCrunch » Rapleaf is Now Live

April 15th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

Запущен RapLeaf | TechCrunch по-русски

February 7th, 2008 at 2:17 pm

Comments

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RBA

May 7th, 2006 at 11:09 am

Neat and simple.

But why do people still insist in creating graphics with text for basic UI (such as form buttons)? That’s like screaming “we haven’t considered localizing this to other languages” or “we have, but have never done it before so we’ll deal with that when the time comes and realize the obvious”…

Also, I see a bit of a problem searching for email addresses or phone numbers. In an ideal world, it’s very helpful, but if mass adoption arrives, expect abuse and serious privacy issues in this area.

Last, why leave it as positive, neutral, negative? Yeah, you keep it simple that way, but if I am going to use a system specialized in ratings, I’d like to dig a bit more. I wouldn’t want to see another rating system that in the end relies on dumb “AAAA++++++” comments, simply because the +/n/- rating itself doesn’t tell much.
Andrew Fife

May 7th, 2006 at 12:33 pm

It seems like this could be the grease that boosts craigslist from purely local transactions, which could have a huge impact on ebay and amazon.
Sherwin Techico

May 7th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

@Andrew: Totally agree with you on that point. This can be huge as Michael is predicting if they do it right.
Bryan Bartow

May 7th, 2006 at 12:56 pm

Thanks for alerting me to this service. I think it’s certainly time for someone other than eBay to own reputation. I’m curious to see how and where rapleaf is going to advertise.
Paul Fabretti

May 7th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

A cracking system and one which should be used by every Web 2.0 company the world over. Want to empower your customers “Web 2.0 stylee” but don’t trade on eBay - then use this. You will be amazed at how much harder you try to meet your service level agreements when you know negative feedback is possible - and that can only be a good thing! Well done Auren and thanks!
Mike

May 7th, 2006 at 1:56 pm

My lawyers are ready to sue this company as soon as a bogus review is made about me - with absolutely no verification of any kind, these reviews are the worth the paper they are written on - or I should say not worth the webpage they appear on …
Dave McClure

May 7th, 2006 at 2:37 pm

wow, what a refreshing attitude.

they’ve been live for what… 3 days?
and you’re ready to sue them for not being fully-featured.

seriously, get a life & a clue.
Blaze

May 7th, 2006 at 2:58 pm

Good luck with the court case @Mike, it should be interesting…

Is there a website for web2.0 law yet? Ah I shouldn’t have told you all my prediction someone’s going to make 20mil off that idea.
John Philip Green

May 7th, 2006 at 3:00 pm

This looks interesting… we should integrate it into Nuvvo for potential students to check out a course’s instructors before they enroll.
Anonymous

May 7th, 2006 at 4:28 pm

Why do you have to register to leave reputation? Registration is one of the most annoying things ever. It makes you either remember hundreds of passwords or use the same password at every website (security?!). If this is Web 2.0, they ought to be supporting OpenID!
Mike

May 7th, 2006 at 6:13 pm

People change email addresses all the time, so beating this system might be as simple as changing your email address.
AhmedF

May 7th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

Dave - I don’t agree with his attitude, but I think it is a good point - what protection does the ‘rated’ user have?
Rod Edwards

May 7th, 2006 at 8:55 pm

I think the Rapleaf folks are doing a great job of implementing a very tricky idea. But - I’d be wary if I were them - the first transaction that goes through on the basis of a Rapleaf score and results in a scam opens the lawsuit door. Similarly, the first business or person tarred & feathered fraudulently on rapleaf = lawsuit too. There’s so many sticky issues. Similarly, good point made above about being able to clear your rep by changing email addresses - with that thought in hand, how would anyone have a bad rep? Ebay works (somewhat) because your ID is tied to a number of more credible identifiers (like credit cards, etc), and of course because feedback is tied into transactions. IMHO, Rapleaf needs a more robust ID tie than email/phone, and a tokenized system of some kind to validate feedback (i.e.: an ebay transaction creates a token for a user allowing them to post a single piece of feedback to a designated recipient). Hopefully the API has a creative and easy to implement token-izer for transaction based sites to tap into!

Anyway - lots to work out, but I’m still looking forward to implementing their API on http://blockrocker.com.
mck

May 8th, 2006 at 3:20 am

Yikes, looks likes it down for right now.

Heh, I could say something about rails, but I won’t.
Johnny

May 8th, 2006 at 3:47 am

Rapleaf sems to be down right now :p

“Application error / Rails application failed to start properly”
Henning

May 8th, 2006 at 3:55 am

Oyh. Someone seems to have problems with their FastCGI servers (it’s ALWAYS the FastCGI servers with Rails apps)
JoJo

May 8th, 2006 at 5:37 am

Application error
Rails application failed to start properly”
Scott

May 8th, 2006 at 5:57 am

Re: the last few comments.

They caused that error on purpose, just to clear up any doubt that they are indeed a web 2.0 company. : )
Easton Ellsworth

May 8th, 2006 at 6:08 am

Rapleaf sure looks promising … it’ll take some time before it gets enough traction to carry its model through to fruition, I think, but it’s off to a good start. I’ve got the little Rapleaf box up at BusinessBlogWire and we’ll see how it goes!
Mike

May 8th, 2006 at 6:22 am

Could it be that someone already sued them and forced their site down all together
Anonymous

May 8th, 2006 at 12:04 pm

Rapleaf looks like an incredibly promising service. Yes, there are definite concerns that have been pointed out above (privacy, identify verification, false/malicious ratings, etc.). All issues that were faced by many other (what are now) web stalwarts ….. give them time to figure it out and I think we’ll all benefit.

Obviously there are a tonne of applications beyond just rating someone’s credibility from a purely commercial (buy/sell) aspect.

How about using the service to rate someone’s ‘datability’ (Hello LavaLife!).

How about using the service to rate someone’s ‘employability’ (Hello Monster.com)
Glen Barnes

May 8th, 2006 at 12:53 pm

Well, I signed up and noticed a couple of things:

1. Your username cannot be longer than 12 characters which means I cannot have my ‘normal’ web login I use for every other site.

2. The phone number field strips any other characters so there is no way of doing international numbers.

I emailed this feedback to Rapleaf and got a response straight away which was refreshing (They are looking at these things). Lets see how this service develops. Could be interesting.
Dominic Ang

May 8th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

Just wanted to point out that this is not a new idea. Some sites that have something similar:

http://www.niftyguy.com
http://www.opinity.com
Ming Yeow

May 8th, 2006 at 7:31 pm

Their individual rep system looks pretty similar to Linkedin, but from business contacts to web contacts. Interesting.
Kelly Smith

May 8th, 2006 at 8:02 pm

Honestly I’m a bit underwhelmed. Could have been done so much better but it’s a step in a good direction.
Justin Vieira

August 2nd, 2006 at 4:44 pm

I did the development integrating this in to http://www.iswapyou.com. The API is nice - I like that it doesnt make the user wait to load rapleaf server data while its loading your servers content. We decided to double up on the feedback systems and use this as sort of a backup to our own though…