Spying On Myself (continued)

I wrote the initial Spying On Myself post in January of this year.  I outlined why I think spying on yourself is a developing trend in web services.  It's a theme I intend to keep tracking.

I took the time to read Seth Goldstein's post on /Vaultstock today. This was a meeting of about 30 people who are using a /Vault from Root.net to track their Internet clickstream.  I wasn't at /Vaultstock but I do have a /Vault and here is a view of it from earlier today:

As you may be able to see (sorry that the picture is hard to read), my top web destination is none other than this blog, followed by Amazon, Yahoo! search, and Flickr.  Two ad servers also make the list, Doubleclick and Atlas.

Seth's post is interesting reading as it talks about where all of this is headed.  My favorite line is from r0ml Lefkowitz, Chief Scientist of Root.net who said:

At the other side of each commercial interaction you have there is a company's CRM database maintaining a record.  What would happen if you had access to a copy of this data and could share, for example, your Barnes and Noble purchase history with Amazon, or your Costco purchase history with Wal-Mart?

That maps pretty well with what Charlie is looking for, which is the ability to show his entire clickstream when visiting ecommerce sites to obtain a better personalization and recommendation experience.

This is all interesting stuff and I am excited to be using a /Vault and learning more about my web usage habits.  Hopefully there will be interesting applications of all of this shortly.

Comments

[Steve Krause]

>> the ability to show his entire clickstream when visiting ecommerce sites to obtain a better personalization and recommendation experience <<

If this is going to happen, then the "Meaning Mining Problem" needs to be addressed:

http://www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2005/10/attention_trust.html

[steve]

sorry if this question is from trhe jurassic-era (where i live) but doesnt all this assume that each PC has only one user? or that multiple users all log in and out of individual accounts?

how do any of these services account for the fact that "clickstreams" or whatever encompass any/all users of a PC or terminal or device? my wife and I and our two boys have two PCs in our house and we all use them in various and overalpping ways. typically we log in and out of browser accounts, but by no means always...

[David G]

Let's be honest with ourselves ...

1) Fred, you already knew what your surfing habits were - nice to have the #'s but it's just "affirmation"

2) Who benefits from this ??? --> advertisers, plain and simple.

3) Neato personalization features - sure, but most sites already do a poor job personalizing with the data we give them - more data wont help