

Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges - vyrotek
http://www.KaBadge.com

======
vyrotek
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...](http://www.kabadge.com/User/Profile/11d39fe94051978a44ce887a4f1a2a0b)

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

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

~~~
michael_dorfman
There may or may not be (monetary) value in that. That's why the business
model is necessary. Popularity does not necessarily equal financial success.

------
vdibart
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
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.)

~~~
vyrotek
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.

------
Maciek416
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?

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generalk
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)

------
jdrock
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.

------
waxpancake
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/>

~~~
vyrotek
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?

------
joshfinnie
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
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.

------
vyrotek
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
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.

------
edw519
_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".

------
zackattack
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
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.

~~~
Maciek416
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 :)

