Whuffie

Whuffie is a fictional currency invented by Cory Doctorow in his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). Whuffie is a type of reputation-based credit. In the book a person's Whuffie balance is determined by other people's opinion of them. There is both right-handed Whuffie (whuffie from friends or people you like) and left-handed Whuffie (whuffie from people who are not your friends or whom you dislike).

A Non Profit organization called The Whuffie Bank announced at TechCrunch50 (September 15 2009) that they would track Whuffie using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The Whuffie Bank also allows users to send Whuffie from one person to another through Twitter, however they do not allow for right-handed and left-handed Whuffie.

So far only one book has been written specifically on the subject of Whuffie: The Whuffie Factor:Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, Tara Hunt (2009).There is a Podcast specifically discussing Whuffie: The Whuffiecast: whuffiecast.com.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow: The book in which aquantinces the term Whuffie was coined. Part murder mystery, part sci/fi, a bit philosophical and more than a little bit obsessive about Disneyland. This book is available for purchase as a traditional book or for free in ebook format from various sources, because the book was released under the Creative Commons license.

The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt: In this book Tara talks about the power of social networking and the importance of building Whuffie - or social capital with your friends, customers and fans. She discusses specific ways companies can and do build whuffie.