Thursday, July 30, 2009

[hturjptw] Seeking reviews in social networks

The problem with reviews is you don't know whether you can trust it: is the writer being compensated to promote the product? More trustable are reviews from friends. It's probabilistically unlikely your friend is a secret promoter (though with the analysis of "hubs" in social networks, it may be possible for advertisers to bribe just a small number of people to dishonestly give false reviews to their friends), and there is a the social trust network in which the friend is embedded for which a dishonest review will disrupt the trust.

Simply out of laziness, it is difficult to get people to unilaterally write a review about a product or service they have purchased. Solution: Use a social networking infrastructure to allow people to signal that they seek a review of a potential purchase to their friends. While people don't spontaneously write reviews, they might if it is to help out a friend.

With more complicated mechanisms, you could get reviews from friends of friends, with the middle friend choosing to pass along the review request signal.

With trusted third parties, you could process anonymized reviews from the signaler or reviewer.

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