Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

about

third rating™ provides a cloud-based, crowd-sourced, next-gen rating system for anything and everything. Rate products, companies, stocks, political candidates, restaurants, music, hotels, airlines – anything. Then ask friends, co-workers, customers and the greater community to rate and vote. The results are real time, ever changing and consolidated in a three digit number ranging from 000 to 999.

We’ve all encountered the 5 star rating system on multiple sites. Our vision is to have third ratings™ replace star based rating systems throughout the Internet.

Our 3rd ID™ system uses connected social accounts to provide the real identity of the individuals rating. Thereby, we eliminate fake reviews, meaningless averages and provide a much higher degree of accuracy and confidence in the ratings.

death to the stars

Star ratings are horribly flawed:

• they average all ratings

• they don’t track changes over time

• getting 0 stars doesn’t indicate a poor rating, just no rating

• the rating itself has no indication of how many people rated

We feel there’s a much better way to rate, well, anything! Welcome to the next-gen rating system intended to replace all other rating systems.

capitalism ≠ cronyism third rating™ is about ratings whose origin is transparent and democratic — not anonymous or “experts” only.

ratings: what is a third rating™?

Every third rating™ is comprised of a mark and a current rating. Ratings range from 000-999. Marks indicate what you’re rating.

Here’s a sample rating:

USGVT: 879

The initial rating 444 is assigned to all new symbols. It is also known as the neutral rating. Over time, ratings slowly degrade back to this neutral rating.

Each mark has a name, a optional reference URL, a general description, and an initial rating.

tags Tags are used to semantically group marks. A tag can be as broad as Finance or as narrow as a political candidate. Tags can have any characters except commas.

identities Our 3rd ID™ system collects bits and pieces of information you provide to us to construct a true identity. The goal of this site is to provide real information about the individuals contributing. Identities are linked with tags and given ratings.

our origin story

On August 2011, S&P downgraded the credit rating of the entire US. This was a humiliating low point, shredding what was left of our collective morale and almost tipping the Country over into a new Great Depression. Watching, having started a small business just three years earlier, my wife and I were frustrated, dismayed and distressed. It was as if there had been perpetrated the most personal betrayal. How could the rating agencies undermine the credibility of the Country we loved? The anger we felt was palpable. We are Americans. Americans will always pay their debts. We started thinking. Who decides ratings? Who are the “experts” deriding our collective fate? Where was the voice of the average American pledging responsibility? It smacked of anti-capitalism.

The S&P rating change was very final. It had broad, immediate implications. There was no way back – no way to “undo” – no way to reverse the rating. There was a psychological malaise hovering in the air. There was no back and forth, no debate, nothing, just a decision by one “rating” agency.

We started thinking that what if ratings could behave more like the stock market? What if there were no nameless or faceless organizations deciding? What if we could get a world wide exchange for ratings? We started looking at other rating systems and what was so prevalent out there. We realized that this was something ripe for disruption. An idea was born. That was the genesis of third rating™.

It wasn’t just the politics that drove us. The concept of The Cloud had just started taking hold in technology. Suddenly, it was feasible for a small startup firm to create a Big Data repository. We realized that we could do this, and scale to size. Of course, every idea seems simple, and other realities intruded. We spent the past one and a half years refining this concept to finally bringing it to fruition.

At the same time, as we worked on a new rating system, we kept looking back to the other sources of ratings on the Internet.

We looked at Amazon (for products), Consumer Reports (for safety), Yelp (for reviews), TripAdvisor (for hotels), Zagats (for restaurants), Angie’s List (for services), Linkedin (for people to a certain degree), Reddit (for news and stories), ZocDoc (for doctors), Martindale (for lawyers), the Exchanges (for companies), Moody’s and S&P and Experian (for credit worthiness), Facebook (effectively for friends), Forbes (for wealth and influence), App Stores (for rating software applications), Last.fm, Pandora and the new MySpace (for music), Trulia (for real estate), and many, many more. The ratings themselves posed similar challenges. We found lots of inaccuracies, outdated information, and outright fraud. There is little to no way to verify who is rating and if there are any conflicts of interest.

Slowly, we kept refining our idea for a universal ratings system that would be used across sites.

Ratings today are siloed. Many are computed as averages, which is quite problematic. Averages obscure changes over time. They can be very stagnant. The rating scale used by most sites is very blunt, ranging just from 0-5. It is an absolute system and does not provide any relativism. From the rating itself, it is difficult to determine how many rated in the last week, movement, direction, trend and relationships between different ratings. Ratings today are 1-dimensional. There are almost no defined relationships between ratings, no subratings.

We think we have come up with a better system, built upon today’s technology. It is a next-generation, crowd-sourced, ratings system for anything and everything.

The system we developed has went through many iterations. Our goal was an entirely open, transparent and universal ratings system. We worked hard to make sure all ratings are public to ensure more honest and open ratings; for example, you cannot comment without rating. We also made ratings richer with a range form 000-999 and the concept of the neutral rating, 444. We added relativism to ratings, restraining the ability to give a rating to only indicating whether you feel the rating should be high or lower and by what degree. Finally, we added dimensionality with the ability to effectively define relationships between ratings and to tag ratings.

We hope to change the global discussion and define a new standard for the humble rating.

the rules

In part of our quest for a truly open rating system, all of the rules regarding third rating™ are listed out below. Any evolutions will be posted to this page as well in plain English.

• What you do on this site is public including who you are, what you rate, marks you create and your comments.

• Once a mark is created it cannot be altered except by creator, only then its description.

• When you rate something you can’t give it an absolute rating from 000 to 999 but you can only give it a relative new ratings within a 3 point range.

• If you were the last person to rate something you cannot rate the same mark again until someone else provided a rating.

• Even if you were not the last person to rate something you cannot rate the same mark in less than 24 hours.

• The highest rating is 999. You cannot rate a mark higher.

• The lowest rating is 000. You cannot rate a mark lower.

• When you create a new mark, it will be born with a neutral rating of 444.