Ever since humans started working for each other, bosses have tried numerous ways to motivate workers. Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Lab's virtual reality Website Second Life, is developing a new venture, LoveMachine, to help measure and reward employee performance.
The company isn't saying much publicly, but Rosedale blogs: "Yes, we are working on making a version of the Linden Lab LoveMachine (and some other tools too), that hopefully we can sell to some companies and help them out. No, that is not all we are doing."
LoveMachine began as a project for Linden Lab's internal uses. Cory Ondrejka, former chief technology officer at Linden Lab, writes in his blog that the company was exploring ways to enable employees to provide feedback to each other, such as praising someone for doing a great job. The first LoveMachine software was launched in 2005. Linden Lab offered small payments to employees who received the highest kudos -- the greatest amount of "love." It helped employees and managers see how well others within the company were faring and, of course, helped motivate employees to perform well.
LoveMachine is a "reputation" system. If an employee is highly praised, he enjoys a better reputation. This is a great example of life imitating art. The art is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by novelist and technology pundit Cory Doctorow. The book describes how, in a future at Disney World, quality of life is based on one's reputation, which is measured by whuffie virtual currency. The more people post good comments about your work and personal life, the more whuffie you accumulate, and the easier it is to get better jobs, housing, meals, relationships, etc.
Obviously, an employee's reputation has always been an important consideration in business. But when Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was published in 2003, techies considered ways to transform fictional whuffie into real-world implementations, with the Internet as key.
In 2004, technology writer and podcaster Steve Gillmor coined the term "enterprise whuffie" about employees acquiring "the reputation of importance" for becoming experts in their fields. The more these experts share their knowledge, the more their reputation -- their whuffie -- increases.
Gillmor uses an example of SocialText, which offers enterprise collaboration tools for blogging, wikis, spreadsheets, and social networking. These products disseminate employees' opinions throughout a company, which could enhance -- or destroy -- reputations.
While SocialText is geared toward enterprises, similar public tools, such as Twitter, spread reputation throughout the Internet. In China, a new trend is Websites for "human flesh search." (I love that designation!) These sites combine information about people from traditional search engines, such as Google, with personal opinions posted by individuals who vociferously praise or pillory the people searched.
Think you've got a great reputation? Check out The Whuffie Bank, announced in September. The bank's software evaluates your reputation and adds whuffie to your account.
To determine how much whuffie to deposit, the software's algorithm examines such criteria as how many of your Tweets are retweeted, how many people like your Facebook posts, whether your postings are original ideas, and whether the people who mention you have high or low whuffie.
Alas, you can't spend your whuffie on much because the organization is still evaluating how to transform it into tangible reimbursements.
The Whuffie Bank has a worthy vision where "only those who do good and well unto others are the richest." I'm not optimistic about this nonprofit organization's chances for success.
I'm slightly more optimistic about LoveMachine providing enterprise software to gauge employees' reputations, but it's a challenge. How is praise from employees quantified and qualified? How do you keep employees from unfairly praising or criticizing other employees? Should there be consequences (firing?) for employees with the lowest reputation?
If LoveMachine can answer such questions and develop a useful business tool, it deserves a lot of whuffie.
— Alan Reiter (AR), President, Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing
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