TrustCloud measures your virtuous online behaviors and transactions online then turns it into portable TrustScore you can use anywhere.

TrustCloud – The currency of the new economy is trust

In June, Rachel Botsman spoke at TED Global about trust, influence and “reputation capital” as the new currency for transactions on collaborative consumption platforms. Watching the video of her talk, which was just released online (below), is a great way to start understanding the relevance of trust and reputation in the digital age. The video is below and it’s well worth a watch.

TrustCloud is built on two key metrics: One is reputation;  the other is behavior. While someone may score highly on reputation, that doesn’t mean that their behavior is in alignment with someone you trust. I mean Paris Hilton has a high reputation but I’m not sure I’d let her watch my kid. TrustCloud is setup to help verify trust; because trust is the basis for most of our economic transactions both online and offline.

By the way, don’t miss my article on BrandYourself, an application that helps manage your online identity.

If you think about the variety of ways we use trust these days and how they overlap between our online and offline world it’s quite remarkable. We eBay to get physical goods from an online resource. We use online resources to pool resources for offline use via sites like RelayRides, AirBnB, or CouchSurfer. We leverage LinkedIn to review potential job candidates and their connections. Trust between strangers plays a decisive role for the success of all of these. TrustCloud aims to be a hub for discerning your level of trust

How does TrustCloud measure trust?

TrustCloud uses three “layers” to gauge trust: Verification, Behavioral, and Transactional.

• Verification – Transparency is a simple indicator to show that you are who you say you are… TrustCloud verifies this by multiple email, snailmail, and SMS confirmations.
• Behavioral – Once you tie your social networks into the application TrustCloud uses algorithms to look for signals about responsiveness, consistency, and longevity. When put together TrustCloud claims to be able to render a pretty accurate picture of how you act online. They also gather data from sites like Quora, Yelp and TripAdvisor… providing advise to others or being helpful online helps your behavioral score go up.
• Transactional – TrustCloud uses opt-in transaction data (like ratings and endorsements) from sharing sites and peer-to-peer marketplaces. So while they do allow you to get endorsements from friends,  co-workers, etc they also use algorithms to look for patterns and weight the quality of sources to give a more accurate context so that you’ll be able to discern that they respected xyz’s car, so it’s likely they’ll respect my rental room.

Essentially, TrustCloud aims to be like your personal FICO score of trust. You can see my TrustCloud TrustCard to the right. TrustCloud already has simple integration for showing your TrustCard through About.me, a widget for WordPress, and a TrustCloud Raplet for Rapportive. It also natively integrates with Tripping, Sharetribe, RidePost, and more. Integration with Tumblr.com and Flavors.me is coming soon. They even have a TrustCloud TrustCard bookmarklet so you can easily place your TrustCard into your Craigslist, eBay, emails or forum posts.

You can head over and give me some trust if you think the content on this site is trustworthy; or just get over there an establish your own TrustCloud Trustcard so you can establish yourself now.