My pal Ross, who is smart, asks a good question: why bother with Stamped. It’s a fair response anytime yet another social network crops us asking us to stop what we’re doing and “like” shit.

Still. I like Stamped.

It’s a clever idea that’s well executed, first and foremost. Unlike the other high-profile rate the real world thing that launched recently, Stamped is simple and constrained. You only sign off on the things that you absolutely approve of, there’s no mishmash of ratings and new verbs, and it’s wide open enough that you can rate anything1 but smart enough to know the difference between a movie and a restaurant. Best of all, there’s no game at work, no way to “win”.

What I like most, though, is the idea of Stamped, or something like it, achieving enough critical mass that I get a curated view of the real world, when I want it. Yelp is borderline useless, Foursquare checkins are noisy. I want to be able to pick up my phone and see a friend-fenced list of movies or books or shows I should check out or be in a new part of town and pull up a map with recommendations from people I trust.

I almost always like the recommendations I get from my friends better than the ones I get from algorithms. So go stamp some stuff.

Because you can rate anything, clever people are having plenty of fun with it, in ways surely unintended. Most of these I chuckle at, I don’t think it’s worth much handwringing since it’s easy enough to just unfollow anyone. If the jokes ruin Stamped, then it wasn’t good enough to begin with. ↩︎