Un-anonymous Online Communities

Today, online communities have members whose identity cannot be tied to physical person. Online communities either have anonymous members or members who are using 'handles' to voice their opinions, recommendations, criticism, etc. Everyone is hiding behind 'handles' in order to safeguard their online identity. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this as one has to safeguard their personal identity to prevent identity theft or any other kind of trouble. However, this does not work well for things such as community members recommending vendors of services (eg: plumbers, electricians, real estate agents, tree trimming services, etc) in the real world.

For example, if you are looking for a plumber in your city, you can surely look it up in yellow pages. But, since there are hundreds of plumbers listed there, how do you know which one is trusted and most recommended one. If you take the online resort to find a reliable plumber, you cannot trust the recommendations because the recommendations are coming from 'handles' which you cannot trust and have to take it with a pinch of salt. In such scenarios, it is necessary that trusted identity of the recommendee come into picture.

The old school way of doing this would be to get a reference of a vendor by asking your colleague or friends or neighbors. Since the recommendation is coming from a trusted contact, you can safely consider the recommendation and act on it. It is necessary that today's online communities, at least those that are revolving around product or service vendor recommendations bring in the angle of trust into picture to make the community worthwhile.

After all, all you want when choosing a vendor of commodity services is a touch of trust to zero-in on that one vendor out of hundreds available.