TrustPlus has launched a preview of its online reputation service at www.TrustPlus.com. Users must download the TrustPlus Viewer, a browser add-on that allows users to view others' reputation information on-the-fly and across multiple sites. TrustPlus currently supports eBay, Craigslist, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

According to the company's press release, the TrustPlus Reputation Engine connects people with their friends, their friends' friends, and so on, creating direct and indirect connections with others. "Users create a TrustCircle of those they trust the most, forming personalized foundations for the TrustPlus Reputation Engine."

TrustPlus takes a different approach than other online reputation services, including the requirement that users download a browser plug-in. It works across multiple websites - users can let TrustPlus aggregate all of their ratings across all of their identities, such as multiple usernames and email addresses. It also has an API in testing and says "various third parties will be implementing reputation systems on their sites utilizing our API."

The TrustPlus approach can be seen in an answer on their FAQs page to the question, "Why so many icons?":

You may have used rating systems in the past that were rather simplistic - often with only three choices along the lines of thumbs-up, neutral, and thumbs-down. Statistically speaking, it is difficult to draw certain types of important inferences from those limited choices. Those systems are effectively engineered to benefit the site they are on, not the persons interacting or transacting. TrustPlus serves only its users, and as such our goal is to provide you with accurate, contextually-relevant reputation information when and where you need it. Accomplishing this requires a bit more data.

Rating systems on sites like eBay and Amazon.com are transaction-based - a user can only leave feedback if they have entered into a transaction with another user. This helps prevent abuse of the rating system. But newer services like TrustPlus and Rapleaf are more open systems. Rapleaf tries to get around the problem of non-transaction based feedback with pattern matching and fraud detection. TrustPlus relies on peer relationships that users develop on social networking services such as Facebook and MySpace. It also has a dispute resolution component that the company says can handle complaints, such as those involving undeserved negative ratings.

As part the beta preview, TrustPlus said EPage Classifieds is integrating its service into all user accounts for its online classifieds site (http://www.epage.com). TrustPlus reputations will include over ten years of feedback for EPage users, providing long-time customers a complete reputation history at the launch of TrustPlus.

http://www.trustplus.com