Last year I created a GreaseMonkey script called Invisible Web that notified you about the web beacons (web bugs) that the page you’re on is using to track your behavior.
Changes in this release:
Install the Invisible Web Greasemonkey Script
Update: Invisible Web now has a Google Code Project
Yahoo! acquired delicious over two years ago. The obvious integration point for delicious is Yahoo! Search but after all this time they still haven’t integrated the two products.
Yesterday I noticed that Google has begun to integrate my Google Bookmarks into my search results. I used Google Bookmarks for a few months and it pretty much sucked compared to delicious except that Google Bookmarks search actually worked. Delicious’ search interface searches across tags and descriptions, it doesn’t actually search the content of the pages you’ve bookmarked. With Google Bookmarks each page you bookmark is indexed so you can search across the tags, description and the full text of the page.
Now that Google Bookmarks is actually integrated into Google’s normal search results as well I need to revisit replacing delicious again.
Man it’s cold here in Boston, spending the week at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA would have been fun but there’s too much work to do at Lookery for any time in the sun.
Visible Measures (VMC), a company I’m an advisor to, launched their Video Audience Measurement product this week at Demo 08.
The Audience Measurement product works by having video publishers instrument their video players with a VMC measurement plugin, think Google Analytics for Video. VMC’s measurement plugin is then able to collect behavioral data such as how long users watch and how much attention is spent on every video played with thier player.
VMC also allows video publishers to combine third-party data sources such as demographic and geographic overlays with each video’s usage data. Tying in Lookery Demographic data here would be a natural fit and something I need to follow-up with Brian and Rishi on.
You can imagine that capturing every video event (fast-forward, play/pause, forward to a friend, rewind, etc) could lead to a huge scaling problem both from a capture and analysis standpoint. When Brian asked me if I knew anyone in Boston that really understood how to design BIG ASS™ data services I immediately thought of Chris Gillett. Chris G. was my Chief Software Architect at Compete for over 5 years where he designed a lot of our large-scale data processing systems. Chris G. joins a great technical team that includes Chris Paul, John Saitta and Peter Winer.
VMC also announced this week the closing of $13.5 million Series B round led by Mohr David Ventures and General Catalyst.
Been having fun using my Invisible Web GreaseMonkey script to see what analytic “beacon” scripts sites use.
“Invisible Web” parses each page you visit and looks for commonly used web bugs AKA beacons. If it discovers a javascript tag belonging to an analytics service it alerts you by showing the an icon (favicon) for that provider.
One of the more amusing relationships that I’ve found is between Facebook and Google. On the surface you would think the two would be enemies given Facebook coming after Google’s AdSense product with their new Social Ads platform.
It seems that Facebook does not share in the common competitive paranoia practice. Facebook is electively sharing their user and traffic intelligence with Google. They do this by using Google Analytics throughout their development site and by including Google Analytics as the only 3rd party analytics provider in their FBML specification. This allows app developers to include Google Analytics tracking for each of their apps.
Now I can’t imagine Google is actively pouring over individual Google Analytics accounts in order to “spy” on a competitor. But there are other ways that Google can use this data:
They can use the Facebook Apps data to learn more about you in order to tune the AdSense and AdWords ads they show you.
They can combine the Facebook data with other Google Analytics data and use it in its aggregate form to design new products and features. (Orkut?, OpenSocial?)
Tim’s post was right on, it’s the data stupid! With their analytics product Google has a view into most of its current and future competitors data.
Google Analytics is the most important Google application after Search.
But as McClure said NO ONE IS PAYING ANY F@#$ING ATTENTION.
Content © 2007-2008 David Cancel. All Rights Reserved.
