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

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...

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.

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.

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.)