What the Whuffie?

A while ago, I was narcissistically searching google for Sherby57, when I stumbled across this page - http://thewhuffiebank.org/sherby57.  Seeing as it wasn’t something that I’d ever signed up to, I was both intrigued and slightly disturbed.

It turns out that The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organisation that is attempting to create a new, online currency, which is based on how people interact on social networks (well, that’s what their web-site say they do).  You have a online “salary” that is calculated using some algorithm which looks at who and how you interact with others.

It seems that in order to get the idea going, the Whuffmeisters (my description) trawled Twitter and auto-generated data on what prospective members would “earn”.  Sadly, they hadn’t singled me out because of my excellence as a twitterer (although, you can follow me, here, because I am excellent).

It’s an interesting concept.   You can “pay” other tweeters from you current funds and so it’s a nice way to reward people you like.  Of course, they can’t actually do anything with their whuffies other than donate them to other people that they like, or hoard them, but you never know how it could develop were the idea to take off.  The best part about it is that it provides some incentive for you to interact with others in a positive way.

Despite being intrigued, I didn’t join.  I didn’t know who these people were and part of me was a but dubious.  I think the concept of them being a “bank” is enough to set the alarm bells ringing for any seasoned internet user – even though they’re not actually asking for any real financial details.

Anyway, after being subjected to Liverpool’s terrible euro-bore draw last Wednesday, I decided to join in an attempt to spice up my evening (you can see how desperate I was).  And not a lot has actually happened.  I’m not convinced that it actually works.  I’ve attempted to donate my whuffies, but I still have all of them.  My salary is currently 49 whuffies\month but my balance is 25W.  This doesn’t even take into account that I’d, ahem, donated 70W to myself from my other Twitter accounts.  These show up as transactions, but I don’t have the extra W.  Your account also shows a list of your recent retweets and the times you’ve been retweeted and this is hideously out of date.

As I mentioned, I did attempt to give my precious 25W away – to a random tweeter who last used the hashtag “whuffiebank”.  I felt that just trying to horde your W completely defeats the object of getting involved.  Otherwise you’ll just have lots of Tweeters with a few W and no interaction whatsoever.  I don’t know how the algorithms that determine your salary actually work, but it needs to be clear that it goes up the more you give away, otherwise nobody will ever have an incentive for doing so.

Unsurprisingly, the highest earners on from the Whuffe Bank are celebrities.  Top of the list is Rev Run with an incredible 1.6million W\month.  This helps highlight one of the interesting aspects of Twitter.  The experience of anybody with a public profile is completely different to those of us that don’t.  Celebrity tweeters tend to have a high number of followers (usually in the 1000s), but follow only a handful.  Obviously, those with many followers should have a large online repuation, but you have to factor in that this is largely built on a non-online presence.  Often they will do relatively little in terms of positive interaction.  For a “normal” twitterer, who retweets lots of people with low reputations, aren’t you paying something back to the community through “hard-work”?  Shouldn’t that be rewarded too?  Or will the Whuffie Bank just be exactly the same as the real world financial system?

I should point out that I don’t actually know how it’s actually calculated, so they may have taken these points into account.

In conclusion: it’s an interesting idea that deserves development, but it doesn’t currently work functionally, or, possibly, conceptually.   To their credit, they have actually replied to my tweets and assure me that they are imminently going to do a big re-launch and re-vamp the technology behind it all. Fingers crossed that it is a big improvement.

On a final note, the Whuffie Bank’s own Twitter account only only earns 57 W\month, which is refreshingly honest (check it here:  http://thewhuffiebank.org/whuffiebank ).  At least their hearts are in the right place.