Whuffie is a new term we’re about to hear a lot of with regards to social media, online communities and internet presence.
I believe the term was originally coined in the sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. In this story, Whuffie is a “reputation-based” currency that replaces money, is constantly being updated and is instantly viewable to anyone at any time.
A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.1
In Tara Hunt’s upcoming book The Whuffie Factor, she relates Whuffie as the “Social Capital” in online communities. The more you’re engaged with your community, the more Social Capital you raise.
The more you interact on Twitter, the more people will interact with you, which attracts others to you as well.2
Just For Fun
The idea that one’s Social Whuffie is always changing got me thinking about how Alexa ranks the most popular sites based on traffic. This is totally ridiculous, but what if one’s Whuffie was also indexed?
Just for fun, I spent a few minutes and mocked up what an index might look like. I based this off of the Victoria Start-up Index (notice YikeSite and Apricado by the way).
| Rank | +/- | Name | Whuffie |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  +21 |
Tara Hunt | 3,454,234 |
| 2 | +2 |
Ze Frank | 3,150,001 |
| 3 |  -1 |
Kevin Rose | 2,980,234 |
| 4 | +2 |
Ryan Carson | 2,001,243 |
| 5 | -2 |
David Heinemeier Hansson | 1,800,339 |
| 6 | +4 |
Om Malik | 1,632,990 |
| 7 | -5 |
Guy Kawasaki | 1,614,635 |
| 8 | -7 |
Michael Arrington | 1,424,014 |
| 9 | +1 |
Gary Vaynerchuk | 1,231,323 |
| 10 | +23 |
Your Name Here :) | 1,000,207 |
The Whuffie Algorithm
Examples of how you gain your Whuffie:
- For each social network you belong to: +50 (plus +1 for every “friend”)
- For every Twitter/Pownce Message: +5
- If you have a blog: Instant +500
- For every blog post: +50 ( x Number of Subscribers)
- If you host a video podcast: Instant +1,000
- For every video podcast episode: +100 ( x Number of Subscribers)
- If you have a Tumblog: Instant +300
- For every Tumblog entry: +25
- For every conference you attend: +200 (Plus bonus +5 for each #tweet)
- For every conference you speak at: +10,000
- Create a popular web framework: +750,000
- Get mentioned on Digg, TechCrunch, etc: +3,000
Examples of how you loose your Whuffie:
- Trash talk somebody: -1000
- Trash talk somebody and get called on it: -2000 (per incident)
- Create a blog post, Twitter/Pownce message or video update that offends the majority of people who see it. -3000
- Twitter about doing laundry -50
Help me add to this list, add more examples in the comments.
1 Whuffie Wikipedia
2 Tweeting for Companies Tara Hunt
OMG...what a cool idea! Let's build it! :)
Could we spin off the Anti-Whuffie Index too? :)
Wow I would have zero whuffle.
ha ha thats sounds really funny if you say it out loud...
On a high level wouldn't a Whuffie index depend on people behaving and interacting in a similar fashion. How would you calculate social capital for different archtypes? I shouldn't be penalized because I dont use Twitter or Facebook on a daily basis. I may be the type of person that acts as a hub rather Tweet about doing laundry (or posting links to the pizza you made). BTW: I made pizza and will be posting my photos soon ;)
In a more simple social structure, like an Ant colony, you have many different roles. Not every one gets to be Queen or the dude that gets squashed to become Spider food. But the purpose is universal, and I don't think ego gets in the way.
I think the current round of Social Apps are based on the most basic fundamentals of social interaction, a user model to create friend relationships. Social Networking 1.0 focus seems to be on building popularity, or getting access to a community.
The real value (current) of Social Capital seems to be in the backend algorithms to position advertising. It would be nice for the user to be able to experience, define, build and control the complexities of its social interaction.
Some interesting research on Archtypes over at http://hcii.cmu.edu/M-HCI/2006/SocialstreamProject/studies.php
Overall, my eyes went cross-eyed when I read your comment and I started to think about butterflies and rainbows.
But I like the idea you brought up around Archetypes. Though I had to look at your link to understand what you were talking about.
I think most of the people on the list (and are amused by the silly idea of a Whuffie Index) that succeed at gaining social capital would be a combo of "Addict" and "Entrepreneur" archetype. Or maybe even a combo of all the archetypes, who knows.
Thanks for the comment there brotha! We do make some damn good pizza these days. Way better than ketchup on bread we used to make as kids.
I love the idea, at least in theory. Ryan's right, measurement is a significant issue. However the general notion of establishing a measurable, publicly knowable value for behaviors and actions that are not necessarily directly (or even indirectly) linked to monetization is, I think, I noble cause. I'd love to build some sort of Whuffie Index into the webspace we're working on, that would become an important criteria, along with one's pizza-making capabilities, in allowing visitors to decide who's hot and who's not...
I love this concept! Shame it is somewhat subjective though, as it'd be nice to create a website that calculates the current top 50....
Came to this place through a Tweet from Andy. My Index would be somewhat low even though I'm heavily connected with the social media sphere in Vancouver simply because I am not on Facebook nor on Pownce.
As mentioned, it's all focused on gaining Whuffie as an individual. The system would probably be liable to whuffie spam/theft :)
What about something where people can increase (or possibly decrease) your index (and then probably increasing their own at the same time too) by blogging/tweeting/vlogging about you? And rather than just one big index, there should localised versions too.
Very cool. Let me know when I can do my first egosurf!
VenCorps is using a participation-score internally that feels a lot like this (private alpha right now, so you'll have to take my word for it) - 10 points for a forum post, 25 for nominating a startup, 5 points for voting on a startup, etc. So far, I've found it drives me to participate a lot more than I would otherwise. Which is an odd feeling.
@Joshua - Can you say PHPTuesdays?
Wink.
One of the problems in this is that either you assign measurements based on currently known services and activities or create generic measurements based on different types of activities. The weighting of these measurements could be adjusted according to other factors i.e. writing a guest blog post on TechCrunch would be more valuable than writing a guest post for Vitamin. There are other network effects such as; does getting a blog comment from a high-whuffie person give you more whuffie than a comment from a low-whuffie person?
It's all fun to think about as long as you don't think about how to implement it.
The whole notion of reputation currency or social capital is indeed a fascinating topic and I love the index. However the Whuffie Algorithm for me seems awfully shallow capitalizing on the notion of popularity and conformity. What happened to the idea of quality not quantity? How many times have you heard from "cyber celebrities" the challenges of maintaining relationships with tens of thousands of people? It isn't possible.
I agree with Ryan and Dave. We have to consider the archetypes, assign value to the activities and weight the quality of interaction. Let's not reward he who goes to the most parties, or collects the most "friends" or delivers the most PC thoughts so as not to offend. Rather, let's reward meaningful interaction, real relationships and quality dialog.
As for losing Whuffie for creating a blog post, Twitter/Pownce message or video update that offends the majority of people who see it, I think you should get +3000 for provoking thought, dialog and debate and + 1000 if said dialog spurs action. Long live freedom of speech, controversy and debate.
That said, the dryer buzzer is going off, got get the laundry....
Haha, dryer buzzer. I love it! Yes Esther, the criteria is quite shallow and was an attempt on my part to almost poke fun at what may be perceived as online popularity. Though I must say I am intrigued by it all and thus by the whole notion of "Whuffie" so I had to write down this silly index idea. However based on some of these responses, maybe it is something that people would actually find interesting on a more serious level ;)
Thanks everyone for the comments, I am humbled by the thoughtful responses and truly appreciate the time you've spent on this post in particular.
Totally Agree with Tara! Let's build it!!! How about a new startup for this ...get it working!
Hey Jeff, great post. Despite the jokey nature I think you captured some important ideas. Any measure of social capital (Whuffie or whatever we call it) needs to be based on activity over time in a wide range of different spheres, including both explicit ratings pulled from services such as Twinfluence, Intense Debate, Digg or wherever; and implicit factors derived from activity on a variety of social sites and services like FriendFeed, Blip.fm, Dopplr etc.
I also think it must be open in the sorts of ways that Hans describes in a usable web reputation service. And mutable.
I've got a longish post on the whole topic of collaborative filtering and social capital (cf-whuffie?) over on the new Scrump blog.
@Tara and @Jorge, we (Jiva) are absolutely serious about building it. It will have to be a collaborative effort so
I think it's a truly lovely theory, and the reality is that we know a persons whuffie from experience and exposure. For example:
I was introduced to Tara Hunt at the ThinkingDigital conference, I know she has the book "The Whuffie Factor", is a prolific tweeter and so forth. Therefore the Whuffie level is specific to my relationship with Tara, rather than Tara's relationship with the world.
To create an index would be very awesome to see, and probably cool as anything to code, but I truly think it could backfire spectacularly if someone had a grudge and a naughty mimic script that wreaked havoc with your Whuffie. This would have an irreversible effect on your rep in the same way that being found innocent for an awful crime could haunt someone forever...
Still, I'll probably not be on that list, so go for it!!
Actually, here's a thought, if list members had to agree to be indexed, then they should have the option to click a "I'm being mimicked" button that would pause there status until someone can verify...
Yes that was cool as I never heard of wuffle ( very similar to shuffle) !