Spyware litigation

For those interested, Eric Goldman’s blog provides a great overview of Adware and Spyware related legal issues.

Google and Spyware

Niall Kennedy has a very good article on “Google’s total information awareness potential”. His basic premise: “Google is already well on its way to building an information awareness network on its own sites as well as the sites of hundreds of thousands of willing webmasters and millions of desktop clients.”

This is not a new issue. John Battelle discussed the potential a while back but Niall goes into more detail about Google’s current status. And, Google is not the only one trying to build this potential – see Kandoodle’s latest activities, also described by Niall.

The issue that Niall doesn’t address is that of privacy. Most consumers/users do not really know that Google is collecting all that information. And, once they do realize it, how will they like the fact that they have it and are using it? Will there be a user backlash? A regulatory backlash?

Personally, I think that the backlash will start with advertisers. Why, you ask? Well, it is true that advertisers stand to benefit from this. Consumers are getting harder to reach, and Google’s Total Information Awareness would advertisers realize the Holy Grail of “One to One Marketing” – boosting marketing ROI. So what’s not to love?

The backlash. More specifically, the threat of a backlash. Advertisers will be wary to embrace something that has the potential to generate a lot of negative buzz. All it takes is a couple of well placed and well known examples, and advertisers will get scared away. Not the SMB folks currently advertising on Google, but the large brand advertisers that are going to be the engine of growth.

Already, there are some pieces of the backlash starting. Liz Lawley talks about her attempt to prevent Google’s information gathering by using GoogleAnon.

The future, I think, is actually the opposite of these data collection schemes. It is Permission Marketing – the idea that companies should allow consumers to opt-in to the types of messages they want. Not spy on consumers and give them what you think they want. Ask them what they want, and let them choose what they would like to see. This idea is supported by none less than P&G, one of the largest advertisers in the world and arguably the best.

Groups like AttentionTrust are leading the way in online Permission Marketing. Everyone should watch to see how AttentionTrust continues to evolve.

TiVo

Slightly off topic (ok, I have posted a total of three things to date, so who can say what is on and off topic…), I am going to rant about Tivo.

I love my Tivo. It has completely changed the way that I watch TV. And made me watch a lot more of it than I used to.

But really, I have to ask at this point if Tivo has any idea what it is doing.

For one thing, it has the worst UI I have ever used. Sure, it is pretty. But searching for a TV program to record is painful; setting a Season Pass schedule is painful. Deciding how long I want to keep a show is painful. Even seeing what shows I have recorded is somewhat painful. And don’t get me started on Tivo suggestions! Picking TV shows at random would yield better recommendations!

Now Tivo has a remarkable idea – let people buy movie tickets and check the weather!

Huh? Everyone I know who has a Tivo also has a PC with a broadband connection. Sure, this may not be everyone, but I bet there is a huge overlap. Why on earth would I look at Tivo, using their incredibly hard to use interaction model, when I could just go to my PC and look it up on Yahoo? For goodness sake, weather? Isn’t that what the Weather Channel is for?

This is not why I bought a Tivo. One of these days, they maybe should do some classic marketing work – hire some people to ask customers what they want. I can’t imagine the first thing they said was “Weather” or “Movie Tickets”.

What people want is control and quality. Look at iTunes. It is successful because Apple knows how people will use their service. What do I want from tivo? To be able to watch my TV shows on my PC or PSP (without the eternal download times and clunky Tivo Desktop software). To watch the Daily Show that I Tivoed while in my hotel room (why don’t hotels carry Comedy Central?). To watch a show I tivo in my bedroom in my living room. To actually get good recommendations of other shows I might like! To record HD! To get rid of my cable box but still record HBO.

At some other point I will write about their new ad search offering. Interesting concept, but I want to wait to see how they actually do it.

The Four Seasons

Picking up on my last post, my wife and I just stayed at the Four Seasons Scottsdale to celebrate our first anniversary. This was my first experience staying at a Four Seasons for anything but a quick business trip, and it was wonderful. One of the things that struck me the most was how personalized the experience was. From the moment I made the reservation (on the phone), they started discretely asking questions – was this my first time staying, were we there for business or pleasure, special occasion, etc. Conversational, to the point that I almost didn’t notice that I was being questioned.

When we got there, we were greeted with a Happy Anniversary. At the restaurant that evening, the Maitre D, waiters, staff all knew it was our anniversary. At the end of dinner, brought us out a complementary Happy Anniversary desert. This happened throughout the stay, always discrete in the Four Seasons way.
I can see some ways in which a technology-only solution could have figured this all out (although Hilton, with all their CRM technology, didn’t on our wedding night, despite the fact we had also blocked a dozen or rooms rooms for our wedding guests, and that I am Diamond in their HHonors program).

But the “Just Ask Them” approach the Four Seasons uses guaranteed a highly personalized, and enjoyable, stay.

Personalized Search – Hype?

Via Battelle:

“Raul Valdes-Perez of Vivisimo begs to differ with all the hype around personalized search (including in my book), and the idea of major engines mining your clickstream to better understand your intent (and give you more personalized ads, of course). In a short paper outlining his views, (PDF download), he outlines five major problems with personalized search and concludes:

…. search personalization is likely to waste the talents of top computer scientists. It may even give worse results…”

The key problem brought up in the paper is that of inference. Can you infer what a person wants from the actions she takes? This is not only an issue for search – it is, more broadly, a key issue for behavioral advertising as a whole.

Valdes-Perez ended the article by saying “the best personalization is done by persons themselves”. At a high level, I agree. I’ve wondered for a while why few people have really explored the approach that I’ll call “Just Ask Them”.

Perhaps the best targeted advertising system around is Amazon’s book recommendation system. They are successful precisely because they use information provided by other users to help you find what you are looking for. Yes, there is a lot of math involved, but the math is “just” to automate the understanding of the volunteered information.

What is yapaZOO?

Welcome to the yapaZOO blog!

Yes, this is yet another blog about yet another stealth stage company. Yes, we know this is a little annoying, and we promise not to keep everyone in the dark too long.

So given that we’re not ready to say what exactly we’re doing, why are we writing a blog? Well, we enjoy reading blogs and have grown a little tired of just contributing via comments on other blogs. We’ll still do that, of course, but thought we would share our ideas from this little soapbox as well. Of course, we’re hoping to get people interested in yapaZOO, but more importantly, we are hoping to share, discuss, and refine our ideas with anyone who happens upon our site.

What will we be talking about? Our general interests (yapaZOO related interests anyway) are centered around Attention, Search (and its Opposite), Filters, Spyware and Adware, and Online Marketing. I am sure I am missing something, but we can deal with that later.