Guileless is about leveraging collective knowledge and experience to enable fast and good decisions free from manipulation.
The strategy is to spearhead an open1 directory of products with reviews, and a user trust network. And use fancy math to combine all this information to give personalized recommendations based on individual preferences.
Thanks for the feedback. Development has not started and may be conditional on sufficient interest and/or support. Please note that at this early "test the waters for interest" stage there is no commitment as to whether Guileless will happen, or, if it does, whether it will be for-profit or non-profit. Thanks for looking. Feel free to spread the word about Guileless.
In the meantime there is an unaffiliated project you may be interested in. It's called lib.reviews and it is another proponent of open reviews. Whereas the Guileless idea is focused on automatic recommendations tied to real experience and free from unwelcome manipulation, lib.reviews is focused on thorough written reviews. It's young, but up and running. You will need to reach out to get an invitation link to sign up as a measure against spam.
If you want to subscribe to updates you can enter your email below and hit enter. If you might be interested in helping work on Guileless, you can reach out by email to paul@guileless.org
1Some people may be intersted to know the exact meaning of "open" in the context of user contributions. A priority for Guileless is to create a safe and pure haven free from manipulation. If any anyone can contribute to the directory, reviews, or trust network without cost, the information could soon be polluted with spam and fake accounts and incentivized reviews. A key strategy to defend against this could be to make such "information pollutants" uneconomical by requiring a monetary cost to participate or contribute. To be effective the cost need not go towards Guileless - it could, for example, be applied to a competitor or a humanitarian charity and still be effective at reducing the manipulative burden. All this is to say that while access to user data may be free, contributing may not. Also, licensing may be such that any competitors to Guileless who leverage the open contributions may be required to license their users' contributions in a similar fashion.
2Anonymous cookies (with a random session id) and javascript are used in the background to connect page requests, page views 10 seconds or longer, and "yes" clicks with the same visitor. You are not otherwise tracked. You can control/delete cookies with your browser if you find this connection objectionable. Your IP address is not logged unless there is an error.
Photo credit: Liza Summer. The woman in the photo does not endorse Guileless.