Using Opinity’s services, you can build a trustworthy identity that can easily be communicated to others online. Your Opinity Reputation Profile can contain a rich portrait of who you are, what you have done, and what others think about you. You can choose to have your information verified. You can verify ownership of online identities, blogs, and even book authorship. In the near future, you will also be able to verify the details of your education, work background, and other elements of your personal history. Note that this process is under your control. You choose what information to give and verify. Also, through reading other Opinity users’ profiles, you can find out about others before you interact with them online or offline. And if you have already had an experience with someone, either online or offline, you can write a review and let others know about your experience with that person.

Opinity is free. We will be introducing premium services soon.

Opinity offers multiple ways of searching for someone – by userid, blog or name. If the user doesn't already have a reputation, you can be the first to provide a review.

You can either conduct a search and start the review process from their Reputation Profile.

Yes, you can write as many reviews as you want about a single person. However, we prevent a user from writing another review about the same person within 14 days from the most recent review date.

Pretty much anything. To help people categorize their reviews, we have these categories:

1. Commerce
2. Dating
3. Community
4. Games

The more information contained in the profile, the richer the picture it presents. Also, if a profile owner has chosen to verify information in a profile, that increases its trustworthiness.

Reviews provided by unverified IDs will not impact the category score.

Evaluating a person´s activity and assigning a numerical value objectively as a rating can be a pretty difficult task at times. Below are our suggested rating guidelines:

5-Excellent (exceptional, perfect ...)
4-Very good (well-done, above average ...)
3-Adequate (good enough, so-so, acceptable, OK ...)
2-Need improvement (below average, minimal ...)
1-Poor (Unacceptable, inadequate ...)

To increase the trustworthiness of user reviews and Opinity reputation ratings, we recommend that you verify your ownership of your IDs when you register them under your profile. The verification process is simple and secure. For any ID you want us to verify, we will use the password you provide to verify your ownership by quickly logging into the site you are verifying your ID on. We may grab additional information about yourself, such as when you joined as a member, or any rating system, but we will capture only information that is available and viewable to the general membership. We do not store your passwords, verification is a one-time event.

Since each person has their own standards with which to review others, reviews tend to be subjective, and in some cases you may not agree with a review. As a reputation profile owner, you have the opportunity to dispute a review. Note: the dispute process can last up to 30 days.

You can also add your own response to reviews, so when others read a review, they will see your point of view as well.

However, if you believe that a review is unfair or inaccurate, you can challenge the review by initiating our unique 2nd Chance™ process.

2nd Chance™ is Opinity´s unique dispute resolution mechanism. Even though reviews tend to be subjective by nature, and it is a reviewer´s right to review another person by their own standards, when you receive what you believe to be an incorrect or unfair rating, you can make a 2nd Chance™ request to the reviewer. Opinity is not involved in this process, but we provide an automated way to shorten the gap between reviewer and reviewee and arrive at a resolution to satisfy both. While this process remains open, the review will not be included in calculating your reputation score.

The process begins when the person receiving the review challenges the review by placing it in dispute. The reviewer will receive a notice that their review is being disputed. There can be several back-and-forth discussions while negotiating a possible mutually agreeable review. The process ends when the request is rejected by the reviewer or dropped by the reviewee, or when both parties agree on a new review. When a 2nd Chance™ request is rejected, the next attempt cannot be made less than 30 days from the date when the process ended.

If the 2nd Chance™ notification email is ignored by the reviewer for 30 days, the review is removed from the record. During the 30-day period, Opinity sends the notification email to the reviewer three times, with seven-day intervals between notifications. A 2nd Chance™ request against the same review cannot be made more than three times.

Your personal network is a group of friends or acquaintances. You can invite them to join your Opinity personal network and view your Reputation Report where they can learn more about you. They can help you build an online reputation by providing testimonials. One advantages testimonials can have over reviews is that they can be from people who have known you for a much longer time and can provide a unique perspective.

From your Home page, click on "Invite Friends." Once you send the invitation, our server will send the person a message that you are inviting them to your personal network. If the person accepts the invitation, the person will be listed as your friend in your personal network and you will be listed as the friend in theirs. Until the invitation is accepted, the invitation will be listed as pending and the friend is not listed as a friend.

The review summary shows their reputation based on reviews in various categories. Additional information on such as how many reviews they’ve given others is also shown.

• Log in
• From the Home Page, click on Personal Info under the main navigation bar
• Under "Email Identities", add and confirm additional email addresses.

Email addresses will not show up on your personal profile, but can be used in a search to find you, or you can elect not to have your email addresses searchable.

Tags are, simply, labels, applied either by others or by profile owners to themselves. They can summarize a reviewer’s impression of the profile owner or the owners’ beliefs about themselves. The number next to each tag shows the number of reviewers who have applied this tag to the owner. Tagging has become a widespread method across the Web of indicating informally what something is about (such as a blog or blog article) or what attributes should be applied to something (such as a person).

These are combinations of usernames and passwords that a user has registered online at various sites. When a profile owner has a verified identity on Opinity, they have proven ownership of the identity by providing us the username and password, which we use to validate at a given site. An unverified identity means that the user claims ownership of an identity but has not given us the means to verify it.

Testimonials are statements made by friends, family and colleagues, and are different from reviews. One advantage testimonials can over reviews is that they often are from people who have known you for a long time and thus provide a more informed perspective than reviews. They do not include any ratings or tags. Only people who have been added to your friends list can give testimonials.

FOAF is an acronym for Friend of a Friend. Wikipedia says FOAF “is a project for machine-readable modeling of homepage-like content and social networks … The heart of the project is its specification which defines some terms that can be used in statements you can make about someone, such as name, gender and various online attributes.” While FOAF is not in widespread use at this time, Opinity enables it for creation of a FOAF profile as part of its commitment to open standards for identity and reputation.

Opinity has partnered with third parties to enable Opinity Profile owners to verify their identity information. Name, age, address, and telephone number can easily be verified. Note that details such as your address and phone number are not revealed in your profile so that your privacy can be maintained. We encourage you to verify your identity in order to increase the trustworthiness of your reputation and identity information.

To increase the trustworthiness of user reviews and Opinity reputation ratings, we recommend that you verify your ownership of your IDs when you register them under your profile. The verification process is simple and secure. For any ID you want us to verify, we will use the password you provide to verify your ownership by quickly logging into the site you are verifying your ID on. We may grab additional information about yourself, such as when you joined as a member, or any rating system, but we will capture only information that is available and viewable to the general membership. We do not store your passwords; we only use them one time to verify your ownership.

Flickr.com has become a very popular Web service where you can store your photographs, tag them, and make them available to others on the Web. You can add photos you have placed on Flickr to your Opinity profile. First you must verify your Flickr identity so we can be sure to grab the right ones.

A Profile Exchange is a way for Opinity users to provide selected parts of their profile to another person. If you've verified elements of your profile, let others know that you're telling the truth about who you are--for instance, your name and address or education or job history.

Initiate a Profile Exchange, and we will send them email containing a link to the information you select. So if someone is thinking about engaging in a transaction with you--for instance, buying or selling, going on a date with you, or renting you a room, show them the information they need to decide whether you are trustworthy. Use a Profile Exchange to provide them the specific information they need to know.

Windows CardSpace is a way to simplify and make more secure the log-in process that most of us encounter numerous times every day that we’re online. Using CardSpace, we can provide our digital identities in a familiar, secure and easy way. In the physical world we use business cards, credit cards and membership cards. Online with CardSpace, we can use a variety of virtual cards to identify ourselves, each retrieving data from an identity provider. Don't struggle with usernames and passwords, just choose an information card!

This functionality is built into the upcoming Microsoft Windows Vista, but you can enjoy the benefits of the technology today by installing beta versions of IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) and .NET framework 3.0 beta into your existing Windows XP or 2003 machine.