Why 3 Startups Are Betting That You'll Want to Stream Your Browser History | Hacker News Reader

Why 3 Startups Are Betting That You'll Want to Stream Your Browser History

mashable.com

18 pointsacconrad16 comments

So they are just like all the other tracking and analytics products like toolbars & alexa with the added advantage of having no restrictions on what details you sell on (after all, it's all public) and that it is directly identifiable (since that is all publicly available as well).

And people want to sign up for services like this because they can brag about something like their sitescore(tm)? "The Sitescore reveals the web's real trailblazers. get points for discovering and spreading cool new things online."

I understand that I'm in the minority here, but I just don't get it.

EDIT: Also isn't this a rather poor value proposition? I click on a fair amount of poor content that I wouldn't recommend. I'm fairly sure that in my youtube lifetime more than 50% of the videos I've seen would get a "I would not recommend this video to anyone" checkbox filled in. It doesn't sound like any of these services can differentiate a bit between a link bait blackhat SEO autoblog I bounce from in 120ms and a deep paper that changes my outlook on life. This is why all the other services have voting...

If adwords tricks 6 of my friends into clicking on an ad for a for profit college is that prima facie evidence that I would like to click on it as well? What did mom say about jumping off a bridge?

I completely agree, I don't get it at all. Also, when will those kids get off my lawn?

It's almost as silly as shopping at retailers with high markup just to get 'airmiles'. I think it's insane, but "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people"

Didn't the Russians go broke by underestimating? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Faltering_Soviet_syste...

The cold war was one of attrition and boiled down to two numbers 1.5 and 2.1. The soviets had access to 1.5 times the resources but used those resources at 2.1 times the rate of the West. (eg. if it took the US 1 tonne of steel to build a tank it took the soviets 2.1 tonnes.) Economists attribute the increase resource cost to the waste and inefficiencies inherent in a centrally planned economy. This is basically why for what a waste of money it was Star Wars was a success because it forced the Soviets into using resources they could not afford in order to keep pace with the west.

Hence, the USSR went bankrupt before we did.

"Instead of sending each other interesting articles, they could just see what the other person was looking at and start their discussion there"

Isn't that what Delicious was? (http://www.delicious.com/) "Keep, share, and discover the best of the Web using Delicious, the world's leading social bookmarking service."

So instead of saving the good articles you find to share with your friends, you are going to save the whole process of looking at the non interesting stuff and then finally showing your friends the good articles? I personally like it when a friend of mine sends me a link to a news hacker article or anything else instead of telling me the process of how they got to the end result.

Why do companies keep thinking I want to share innately private things, like my browser history or credit card transactions (Blippy)?

Something mysterious about being transparent I guess. I feel that there is a lot emphasis on "show the world everything and let the community reward you/scold you on your actions" type of mentality with these sort of services that entices some people.

...because they can make money by selling your privacy.

Good question. Some subset of the population is willing (wants?) to share such personal information (credit card transactions, etc).

Even then, users want to curate the info to present their best foot forward. Think of checking in to a nice restaurant instead of Taco Bell on Foursquare. Or sharing an iTunes purchase instead of an embarrassing one on Blippy.

While sharing their browser history, it seems rare that users would share 100% of their history uncurated. As long as they have the option to selectively show their history, users would be OK with it.

You may not, but many people seek attention.

Asking you for what is already public would be no fun. People are forming various schemes to get you to part with your private data because that is what is valuable.

It's all fun and games until someone famous gets caught watching porn.

I started using one of those productivity tracking applications that monitors your program use, as well as your browsing history. When I forget it's tracking me and it gives me a report of how I just spent an hour watching hulu and other crap like that, it's embarrassing enough just for my own eyes - based on that, there's NO way I'd want anyone else looking through my history.

Now, if there were a way for it to know what the cool "trailblaze"-y things are that I'm doing and skip over all the irrelevant (99%) stuff...

A relevant project from MIT CSAIL : "Eyebrowse:track, visualize and share your web trails" (http://eyebrowse.csail.mit.edu/).

Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor tried this more than 5 years ago with AttenTV / Attention Trust. It'll be interesting to see if the idea takes off now.

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