Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

http://www.KaBadge.com

by vyrotek • 17 years ago

26 29 17 years ago

vyrotek4• 17 years ago

My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m hoping that sites will want to partner and award badges since they can get some visibility with links on the profile pages of users.

The system is based on the email addresses you used with the services you use. You can claim multiple addresses and manage them as a single profile. Another important feature is that the service does not require user registration to benefit from it. For example, StackOverflow.com might decide that you earned the 'Teacher' badge. They would make a call to our API and say "give youremail@example.com the Teacher badge". Even if we didn’t have that email is our system yet, we would record the action and the owner of that email can claim their badges later. Now when you sign up or use other sites they could place badge requirements upon registration or when trying to access special features. Perhaps all new users must have at least 3 StackoverFlow badges and 2 Twitter badges. Maybe a game forum requires that you have X WoW achievement to post comments. In a way, it becomes a sort of CreditScore for your contributions to other sites.

Also, since blog comment integration seemed like the perfect way to share your profile's URL, the system works similar to Gravatar. By MD5 hashing an email, you are able to link to someone's profile without exposing the email address associated with the page. So when you leave a comment on a blog, the blog engine can hash the email and link to your profile. Now we can all see how awesome you are on the internet.

As you can tell, this isn’t complete. I finished enough to get the idea across and get some feedback. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. I wrote and designed this all myself and I could also use some suggestions on how to take things to the next step. Does it sound like an idea that really needs my full attention and possible VC funding since I depend on partnerships? Is this something you would use? Can other sites and services be bothered to publish this sort of data?

This is my example profile: http://www.kabadge.com/User/Profile/11d39fe94051978a44ce887a...

hopeless• 17 years ago

ok, interesting idea and nice site but where's the business case? i.e., "show me the money!"

jdrock2• 17 years ago

At scale, this site/idea could theoretically "own" the reputation market. There's definite value in that.

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

Kabadge, The FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) of the Social Internet.

joshsharp• 17 years ago

Trying to consolidate a person's reputation across the web is a great idea, and one that's only going to become more important.

However, I'm glad I read your explanation here because the site itself tells me very little and without reading your explanation I probably would have shrugged and kept browsing. Put this explanation on your site, and show people an example profile.

You really do have a "chicken and egg" problem trying to get providers to see the value. My two cents would be to write some blog posts on "the reputation currency" and try to get as much attention out of that as you can, getting people excited and enthused (and bumping up your own reputation on the topic). To me that seems like the best way (short of reaching out to many partners) to gain some traction.

Good luck!

MicahWedemeyer2• 17 years ago

I would never limit access to a feature on my site based on badges someone has earned on another site. It's like slapping a big sign up that says, "In order to use this site, you also need to sign up for X, Y, Z, ..."

It's hard enough to get users to sign up for my stuff, let alone make them sign up for something else. Throwing in additional roadblocks is definitely not the way to go.

That's not to say I'd be against showing the badges they've earned elsewhere. That would be nice, I suppose.

Another problem: If things go very well for you, you'll end up with hundreds of partners all pushing badge info. On the other side, you'll have consuming partners that want to use this data, but they'll need to know exactly what badges to extract. Not every user will have the same badges from the same sites, so the consuming sites have to do the legwork of deciding which badges they want to display.

Further, if site X decides to change their badges, all sites that consume from X will need to change as well, or just keep displaying the now stale data.

Seems like too much communication will be necessary between all the different parties.

harpastum• 17 years ago

I'm not exactly sure what legwork you're talking about for the 'consuming' sites. From what I understood of the description, the KaBadge site is the sole repository of badge information, with consuming sites pulling from that data when displaying a user's information (hence the API). As such, consuming sites will simply access that user's full or partial list of badges (possibly sorted by importance, or order of acquisition, or a genre system?).

A consumer might have to do specific badge checks for restricted sites like the WoW forum example (I agree that I would never use this feature myself, but I can see some value in it), but they would clearly know exactly what they were looking for beforehand.

amalcon2• 17 years ago

Ah, I see now. This strikes me as an idea that people will like, but I just can't see the use case.

Maybe it's because I've never understood the whole "achievement" thing anyway, but I can't come up with a reason to care about them at all. I can't think of a reason to use a system that restricts access only to people with completely arbitrary credentials. I can't think of a reason to implement such a restriction, either.

I can think of a reason NOT to export my application's "badges" to other applications, if any: it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges. It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.

That said, I don't want to be too down on the idea. It's got some potential as an information hub. I would consider losing the "badge"/"achievement" terminology, downplay the "access control" angle, and bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application.

I could see benefit of sharing information about -- say -- how often a user makes posts on user-moderated discussions, as opposed to voting, or that sort of thing. Swapping numbers and ratios instead of boolean data reduces the arbitrariness of the thing. The ability to use them in subtle ways, as opposed to ham-fisted restrictions, would likewise reduce the temptation to create throw-away accounts.

vdibart2• 17 years ago

>> it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges.

I doubt anyone would make a (non-spam) system that rewards people just for signing up. The site creator would be careful to reward only meaningful actions. So this isn't realistic.

>> It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.

That's the whole point of the badge itself though - encourage a particular type of behavior. I don't see this as a problem either.

>> bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application

Very interesting take on the idea.

vdibart2• 17 years ago

It's an interesting idea but there are a couple of things you should think through before taking it too much further. I don't think depending on partnerships is necessarily horrible, but what I'm trying to determine is what the benefit for the partner is. In the Stack Overflow example, Stack Overflow has to create the logic of when to award the badge, create the badge asset (e.g. what it looks like), and call your service at the appropriate time. So far they've done all the work for your benefit. What do they get in return? This is the kind of thing you might want to think about otherwise it's just a glorified/unified badge gallery, which won't be terribly interesting to many people.

I also think your example of other services limiting behavior depending on badges gained on other sites to be unlikely. From the consumer's perspective, a reputation system has a lot of value in context, but that's very different than saying that my reputation on one site has value on another. From the partner's perspective, I find it unlikely that I would build a site that depends on my audience's behavior on someone else's site.

I don't think these things are deal breakers, you just have to target it a little more precisely. Nice work so far.

patio11• 17 years ago

Integrate this with a selection of a few dozen no-programming-required badge templates and a badge/achievement designer, though, and you could have something.

Example: there should be a quick fire-and-forget Javascript method to increment a per-user arbitrarily named variable that you keep track of, and then when you exceed some threshold of that, you get a badge. That allows you to use one system to support everything from "Slay 100,000 orcs" to "Print out 75 bingo cards", with negligible work from your API consumers. The fact that it is negligible work creates value whereas your base offering (show that you've slain 100,000 orcs on your teaching bingo site profile! Booyah!) does not.

Other easy things to measure are stickiness (time since registration), collecting all of a set of API calls, etc (For example, in the hosted badge designer, you could say "A Dragonslayer is anyone who submits any [dropdown: two] of the following events: killed-red-dragon, kill-blue-dragon, and kill-green-dragon. Then customer site only has to fire killed-#{monster.name} as appropriate, and boom, dragonslayers.)

vyrotek4• 17 years ago

I must admit, this type of thing as you and dflock have described has always been in the back of my mind. I kept tell the thoughts to go away because thats a pretty big undertaking. Fortunately, I actually have experience building customer facing rule engines.

This is dangerously tempting to work on. Should I go for it? Perhaps I would need to provide both methods of awarding badges. I dont see StackOverflow.com wanting to re-implement their badge system rules in the KaBadge system.

dflock• 17 years ago

I would agree with some of this - as a potential partner site, I would sign up (and maybe pay?) if you were providing me with a complete reputation system, as this would save me coding my own, ala Steam and XBLA Achievements. Is this in the game plan?

zackattack• 17 years ago

i could see this becoming useful if you did ALL the work for the users. get their email & facebook connect, and then scrape their browser history for visited links and find them there.

hundredwatt• 17 years ago

Or you could operate more like the credit bureaus do for banks by selling your service directly to websites instead of end users. You connect in the back end with all the sites, they send you users information, and then you parse it all into one solidified reputation.

Doing something like this, you could act as a sort of social network background check, as users would not even need to opt-in to your service, they would automatically be signed up when they join the various sites.

Maciek4162• 17 years ago

That's a pretty cool idea. A web-of-trust problem would have to be solved: the various systems that connect to the system would need to trust each other's internal reputation systems. You'd have to prevent people from inflating their total reputation by using a single site with an easy-to-game reputation system. Some interesting challenges in there :)

joshfinnie• 17 years ago

Seems like there are still some growing pains with this site. I received a few errors just trying to explore the site. Also, I agree that even though this is a great idea, I think it is going to be difficult being first in this market.

AndrewWarner• 17 years ago

For example: The "About" link on the home page didn't work, so I went to http://www.kabadge.com/about and got an error.

I like your idea though. Keep going.

edw519• 17 years ago

View which badges you have already earned.

Very clever. Almost irresistable.

Of course, once you get to the next page and see that you haven't already earned anything, "curious" is replaced by "disappointed".

jdrock2• 17 years ago

My first thought was "Xbox Achievements for the Internet". This may be a good 1-sentence elevator pitch for certain audiences.

Definitely think working with the partner sites to make the end-user experience as transparent as possible is the way to go. Also want to make it very easy for partners to hook in to your system (e.g., simple API calls around their existing login/event logging process).

This may sound silly, but you want better icons/eye candy for your badges. They should be things you want to collect.

generalk• 17 years ago

The main page you've linked to tells me almost nothing about the service you're offering. From the first page I should be able to answer the following questions:

- What's an achievement? What's a badge?

- How do I earn them? If I want to go off and earn something right now how do I do that?

- Why do I care? What's in it for me?

It's difficult to review something when I have no idea what it is.

(Edit: formatting)

Maciek4162• 17 years ago

If you want to be the gravatar of badges, you need to make it just as quick and easy to implement.

To that end, you should have your partnering system working as soon as possible. Ideally, it should be as easy as clicking "become a partner" and copy + pasting some simple parametric URLs into your app (or something of that nature). Show someone how easy they can implement badges in less than 5 minutes.

I also agree with one of the other posts here, you should take reputation system management workload off the shoulders of your partners. Right now someone else does all the work and you get the benefit. It would be nice to be able to ping your system every time a user does one action towards the goal of some given goal.

Starts to sound a lot like conversions and goals in Google Analytics, doesn't it?

waxpancake• 17 years ago

Related: BravoNation http://bravo.yahoo.com/ -- an experimental site launched by a very small team at Yahoo! in 2007. I wrote about it on Waxy, describing it as "a web-native equivalent of XBox Live's achievement system, abstracted to work with any online community." http://waxy.org/2007/12/exclusive_yahoo/

vyrotek4• 17 years ago

Cool, I never heard about this project. It seems like its a Peer2Peer award system, is that right? I considered creating a sort of peer kudos/badge feature as well but there are a lot of issues to overcome with that. Basically the same problems Twitter has. How do I stop people from giving the "free diet pills award!" :) Thoughts?

vyrotek4• 17 years ago

Thanks for the fantastic feedback everyone! I was hoping to respond and discuss things as comments were left but it was busy day. I hope to address some of the suggestions directly tonight.

iterationx• 17 years ago

You want to somehow make it more compelling for the sites whose badges you are using. I think you should brainstorm a bit more on that sales pitch.

Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

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