honestly, i'm not into it
This morning I had a quick back-and-forth with Jeremiah Owyang, a digital/business strategist, very smart guy, and somebody who I had the privilege of meeting briefly at SXSW 2010, when he endorsed a site called "Honestly" via twitter and I clicked through and voiced concerns about the service. (during the writing of this post, I found that others had similar initial reactions when the site was known as "Unvarnished") According to their site: "Honestly.com is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews." Seeing my comments, they quickly jumped in and provided me with a link to their blog posts that were tagged with "safety". They've done plenty of thinking about user safety, and written about the safeguards built into their site.
That being said, here's why I'm not gung-ho about Honestly:- The content of the site is only visible once you sign in via Facebook connect. This always rubs me the wrong way. I want to check out the site, take a tour, see what other people are writing and get a feel for the breadth of the community and conversation. Can't be done here, and it's a red flag for me.
- You can review non-members, and create a profile for them. I have a few social profiles, a blog, a twitter account and a linkedin profile among others. Anybody who wants to can use one of those platforms, or one of their own, and point to me in a positive or negative light. I'll see it, and I can respond to it. (or, if I see that the source isn't worth responding to, I can choose to ignore it) Reviews should be (1) about making the people we work with better and (2) about helping others assess working with that person. As a yelp user, I can see the inconsistency in this point of view, but yelp reviews are public, and businesses could see their reviews before deciding to sign up. Should I just be paranoid about what people might be saying about me, or should I *sign up now* to find out? (see point 1)
- Reviews are on this site are anonymous. There is a place in our society for anonymous sources, but it should be reserved for people who would be legitimately endangered in some way by coming forward, or people who have uncovered something terrible and need to stay close to it so they can ultimately end it. Anonymity is for whistleblowers, not for assessing the performance of our business colleagues and teammates. A counter to this might be that internal company reviews are anonymous. That's true to some extent, but the reviews and the reviewers are evaluated by people who understand the feedback and can put it in context. Also, company performance reviews usually involve references to specific instances of excellence or failure, which further validates the information.
