About TrustedOnes
TrustedOnes is a brand new social platform that focuses on trust-based networking in the consumer, and business to consumer space. The company was incorporated in 2008, and launched on October 20th, 2008.
Description of user contribution system
TrustedOnes helps consumers and friends leverage word of mouth advice, and drive more customers to local small businesses, those which provide excellent service, but don't have the marketing dollars to compete with bigger companies.
There are already many highly specialized and successful social networking sites that let their users connect with like-minded individuals, and explore their passions for movies (Netflix), knitting (Ravelry), auctions (eBay), videos (YouTube), photos (Flickr), friends (MySpace), etc.
TrustedOnes takes a different approach. Instead of taking one particular topic of interest and building a large community of individuals around it, TrustedOnes' emphasis is on trust and a much wider range of topics. “Our goal is to help users make better product and service decisions, based on trusted advice from their friends. Part of the fun is learning from friends on topics you'd never think they'd know anything about,” said Arno.
Benefits for the users
By cataloguing word-of-mouth advice and recommendations between friends, TrustedOnes helps users make better product and service decisions, faster. Users can post recommendation on anything, anywhere, be it a book, a local bookstore, or a restaurant in Venice, Italy.
Small businesses are a natural fit, and benefit from the network effect that word-of-mouth generates.
Benefits for the creators of the system
Our custom-built social knowledge management platform doesn't require scale to deliver value to users, but scale will make it valuable even for casual Internet surfers who still rely on the wisdom of the crowds.
History of the idea
Started by Arno Grbac in 2007: "I would often spend hours researching things on the Internet, reading reviews and recommendations from people I don't know. Word of mouth advice from friends is best, but between my head and the piles of sticky notes, most of it gets lost and forgotten.
Then I thought: “wouldn't it be nice if there was one place where my friends, their friends and I could keep all that great word-of-mouth stuff, and be able to find and use it whenever needed?” So, I decided to build TrustedOnes."
Scale
TrustedOnes finished private beta testing in August of 2008, and launched on 10/20/2008 - 11 days ago. Since the end of private beta, the traffic has been increasing exponentially. We currently have a small, but growing user base, and monetization is not a priority at this point.
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