Opinity and RapLeaf Partnering

On Monday there was considerable stir on TechCrunch about a new company, RapLeaf, described by Mike Arrington as follows:

"Rapleaf will allow anyone to leave feedback for anyone they’ve transacted with. Others can use this feedback to help them determine if they are doing business with someone who’d likely to engage in fraud. Rapleaf is eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world."

Today I'm happy to announce that Opinity and RapLeaf are going to work closely together to offer Internet users the best of both their services as seamlessly as possible.

Specifically, Opinity and RapLeaf have entered into an agreement to integrate their services so that they can:

• Pursue and delop ways to create and exchange value related to e-commerce ranking and reputation/reputability for the benefit of end-users on the Internet

In order to make this happen,

• RapLeaf will provide Opinity the use of RapLeaf's e-commerce rating tools
• Opinity will provide RapLeaf with continuous access to Opinity's API so that RapLeaf can instantly retrieve and verify ID and other reputation-related data.

Less formally, I'd just like to say I think this totally rocks. The combination is more than the sum of its two parts--think John Lennon and Paul McCartney. To a large extent, this space--call it reputation-out-of-the-silo--needs to be created, and doing so almost certainly requires more than one company. Call this little partnership an embryonic consortium, one that sets a laudable precedent and implicitly invites other like-minded organizations to join in to create user-centered reputation.

Technorati Tags: RapLeaf, Opinity, partnership, reputation, eBay, e-commerce