Trust is…

…when you respect someone’s opinion so much that it impacts your evaluation of the thing he recommends. Call it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of taste. I think that any professional critic who has achieved a following starts to think about things more in terms of what their audience expects from them than in terms of their own personal taste. It’s because trust is binary — you either believe in someone or you don’t.

That said, trust is not necessarily global. As I told Melanie today, I trust her taste in music and (most importantly) people, but I’ll judge for myself when it comes to sushi (I’m a pretty big food snob, and most of the people I do trust in that area are chefs — so, Mel shouldn’t take it personally ). This is how we live our lives: there’s the musician friend you ask about the latest albums and the film geek you consult before going to the movies. And it seems to me that life gets a great deal less stressful when you find those domain experts you trust so much that their endorsement actually makes something seem *better* and you put your fate in their hands totally on the faith that they will continue to live up to that trust. When Ian tells me to buy a book, I just do it (and sometimes even read them). This is basically a type of personal delegation: “I’m hiring you to be the manager of this decision for me.” And just like in the workplace, you can get burned (“Dude, that movie totally sucked! What was he thinking?”). And then you take action after the fact (“fire” that person by not trusting them anymore).

In fact, this whole line of thinking was inspired by observing how Marco works. If he trusts you, he just wants you to go off and do stuff and come back when it’s done — no check-ins, just trust. I’ve watched this management style both spectacularly succeed and spectacularly fail (IMHO, no middle-ground isn’t such a bad thing). When it goes wrong, there’s generally a lot of yelling and late nights fixing things. But when it’s going well, it’s amazing to watch (or be a part of). The trust becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — people proactively look to live up to it.

While trusting the wrong person on a big decision can be a devastating mistake, handling all the big decisions yourself means you are inherently limited in the number you can make. And when you find the right people, the time and energy you can save by trusting them will likely greatly outweigh the potential cost of a screw-up multiplied by the probability of one happening. Finding the right people to trust is the hard part (knowing when you have is actually the hardest part), and I can’t tell you how to do it (my dad calls it “ass-twitch”, don’t ask). But once you’ve found them, you want to remove all friction and empower them as much and as easily as possible (I should probably just give Ian my credit card and have him order me the books himself).

I would love to see a product that allows me to do this across all my online services. Yahoo! Music has this great (if completely buried) Influencers feature, which allows you to choose other users whose ratings get factored into your recommendations. But, there’s no way for me to see those recommendations (a la Netflix). So, all of that knowledge is only actionable in the (relatively limited — but, that’s another post) context of Yahoo! Music. Other services, like Netflix and Yelp and Yahoo! Local, allow you to add friends so you can easily see their ratings, but these features are broken in a couple ways.

First of all, they require you to recreate an instance of your social map on their proprietary system that’s only useful within that context (in the case of Y! Local, it’s Y! 360 — but who actually uses *that*?). So, I’m supposed to create and maintain as many lists of friends as services I use online?! openness rant here> But even if they did build off the very robust Facebook API, for example, what these services are doing today still wouldn’t work for me. I don’t want to just see the average overall rating and then my friends’ individual ratings. I want to be able to at least see an average of just my friends’ ratings. And if you are building off of a central address book/social map, then I will need the ability to customize the lists of friends whose opinions I care about for each of the respective services (I want Ian’s opinions on music and books but not movies).

Back in the old days of Web 1.0, I believed that only a large company like Yahoo! or Google could pull this off because of all the integration points (at the end of the day, all this is really is a management console on top of your address book and integration with the relevant services). But now, I think this has a better chance of being built as an open standalone web service. I’m waiting…