Dataportability and abuse/advertising

This is the sort of thing I have been talking about. Oh ok, I know I come across as some old technophobe but seriously, dataportability has to be TOTALLY in the hands of the member who can guard the gate to the gated community. Otherwise it is so ripe for abuse.

An ad-technology firm called Lotame is trying to aggregate inventory on several of the smaller, so-called second-tier social– networking sites and, in doing so, create a system where it targets not just by interests but also by how often people comment, upload photos and video, and rate other people’s media. (AdAge full article)

That’s your content that has ads next to it, the ‘second-tier aggregation‘ part means porting your content from smaller more personal social networks – which the members ‘assume’ are private or feel they can afford to ignore the ‘invisible audience’ – into a datastream for analysis. It then returns advertising based on your actions.

Or in simple terms: you take an action on any social network, it’s analysed and advertising is fed back to you. *shrugs* maybe it’s not important? Maybe it’s a natural outcome, like Google Adwords next to your email based on keywords in each email? I don’t know – I never minded/don’t mind Google reading my email and sending me ads, but for some reason, this aggregating of my online interactions with friends for delivering advertising gives me the willies. Maybe what is starting to annoy me is that this isn’t advertising on ‘professional’ content but on stuff I am making myself – I’ll take a clip of that ad sale please!

‘Hypertargeting’
MySpace, which has introduced “hypertargeting,” chunks its audience into many different vertical-interest buckets. Neither it nor Facebook works with Lotame, a factor that illustrates the network’s biggest challenge: persuading the larger sites to give up data on how users act within the networks, according to people familiar with the technology.

That’s a fact that doesn’t bother Mr. Monfried, who recalls that when he helped start Ad.com in 1999, he went to agencies to sell the third-party network and the first question he got was “Do you have AOL, MSN and Yahoo?”

“I’d say no, but we help aggregate the rest of the internet,” he said. “Lotame is doing much the same thing with social media. There’s value in mid-tail social sites … and a huge market as this evolves outside of today’s portals. I’d call MySpace and Facebook today’s portals for social networking.”

… yep, he totally gets it.