I'm Tav, a 29yr old from London. I enjoy working on large-scale social, economic and technological systems.

I am extremely pleased to announce the alpha release of Espra Trustmap. Trustmaps fulfill a real need on the web of knowing who to trust and for what. It allows for the creation of many useful things, including a PageRank for People and provides the infrastructure needed to overcome problems like information overload.

The super cool Trustmap development was done by James Arthur (@thruflo) as part of the Espra Iteration X development. It currently supports:

1. Browsing Trustmaps through a Graphical Navigator.

   

2. Adding users from Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Flickr or YouTube to your Trustmap using Contextual Identifiers, e.g.

   ~twitter:timoreilly or @timoreilly
   ~facebook:thruflo
   ~delicious:qopi
   ~flickr:olasofia
   ~youtube:happyseaurchin
   

3. A Command-line Syntax which you can even use through Twitter!

4. An Open API to manage trustmaps and query the trust data — allowing developers to create their own trustmap-based apps.

5. A demo application — tweets.trustmap.org — which allows you to do Twitter searches across individual Trustmaps.

This is just the beginning — an alpha release on top of App Engine. It's part of a much bigger vision of an open source, peer-to-peer web platform and reputation economy. You can help out by supporting Espra!

To keep posted:

Follow @tav	Follow @thruflo	Join Espians

And if you want to get involved in any way you can:

• Use this webchat client to join the live chat on irc://irc.freenode.net/esp.
• Clone the plexnet repository on GitHub.

Apologies in advance for all the bugs — it's an alpha release after all and is mainly intended as a working proof of concept. I hope you like the direction it is heading in and look forward to finding out what you think.

I'd also appreciate it if you would help out by supporting Espra — Thanks!