Global Points and Badges System
This idea comes from the desire to build a really cool Kynetx app for our upcoming conference to help motivate people and reward them for their participation. The idea is to be able to award users points and badges within an authority domain and have that information accessible to any app that wants to use it. The system will need to be able to contextually correlate the points and badges for a user across several authority domains.
What do I mean by authority domain? I’m not completely sure that this is the best wording just yet but… Let’s say that I am using the cool Kynetx conference app and I get several badges and points going to said future conference and participating. Who gives me those points? What authority do they have to give those points and badges to me? How did they get that authority? How does the system know and recognize that authority?
Some other questions I have is how does the system identify users? Hashed email like gravatar? Global user namespace specific to the system? Facebook/Twitter login? Should the system allow multiple methods of user identification per user and the ability to link those?
Can you imagine interacting with visitors to your site or your store and knowing that they have earned the {insert awesome achievement badge here} badge? This kind of system could give you a whole new context to deal with the customer and customize their experience. If a customer calls up tech support for their internet service provider and already knows all about the technical details of how the internet works, the customer service rep doesn’t need to sit around explaining stuff like they would with a customer that knows nothing about the inner workings of the internet. A global badge system could give this kind of insight and I want it!
I’m thinking that I’ll start to build just the very basics of what I am dreaming about. I’ll keep it super simple so I can start to play with it and learn about this kind of system and api. I want to keep it simple enough and build it quick enough that it doesn’t hurt too bad to throw it away or start over after I learn a bunch. : )
Completely forgot to add a link to this awesome video that discusses this concept but in a slightly different way and a bit more abstract. http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man.html
