Is Apple becoming evil?
November 19, 2007
Apple has a reputation of being a fair and open company and has acquired a massive die hard fan base thanks to this approach. They are seen as one of the good companies compared to others such as Microsoft (and sometimes Google).
However, they’ve not been doing themselves any favours of late…
First they crippled peoples iPhones when they tried to update, hack or unlock them. I can understand the desire to do this but it’s fairly narrow minded and unnecessarily antagonises the types of customers they rely on as a tech company.
Now they’ve committed what to me is a cardinal sin. According to Techcrunch there is a feature in the iPhone which sends data back to Apple all the time. This data includes IP address, stock quote preferences and other preference data, worst of all though it sends the IMEI number for the users phone back as well.
Now an IMEI is one of those rare bits of data which can instantly be linked to a person, unlike things like IP address which are more transient and changeable. This means that Apple could be building a profile for all it’s iPhone users with more than just who they are and the fact they own an iPhone. This could contain data that would be hugely attractive to advertisers around the globe.
So could Apple be planning a Facebook? Possibly. Are they harvesting information on their users? Undoubtedly, yes they are. What they plan to do with that data is anyones guess at the moment but Apple should expect to receive some backlash from their customers for this as it seems a breach of privacy to me.
Update – 20th Nov: The latest from Techcrunch is that this isn’t 100% true, apparently the iPhone doesn’t send an IMEI back to home base.
Social networks overtake web mail
November 7, 2007
For the first time the new darlings of the web (social networks) have overtaken the old darling (web based email) in the traffic stakes. Hitwise have a report showing the upward trend for the social networks and the rate at which they have caught up the likes of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
So, are users now using social networks instead of email? Well yes they are , naturally, they are a quick way to converse with close friends especially to groups of friends. And they’re more fun to use, something email providers will have to address (OpenSocial and Gmail perhaps?). However, email still has it’s place and the demographic data from Hitwise shows that unsurprisingly it’s the younger users who visit social networks more.
One factor we should also consider is that email is something that you visit a few times a day maybe (unless the web is your life) where as users tend to browse social networks for long periods so the traffic is bound to be higher.
Facebook to use cookies for an ad network
October 30, 2007
Both Techcrunch and Venture Beat have posts about the forthcoming (still rumoured though) ad technology from Facebook. Word is that it will use cookies to track users data and activity on Facebook and then serve them ads based on that data when they leave the social network and browse other web properties.
Sound idea! Facebook profiles carry a wealth of data that could be of use to ad serving technologies.
Now, this won’t work unless there is a third party cookie involved which is tied to the ad network and not Facebook. Otherwise the cookie would only be of use to serve ads while on the Facebook site. So will this cookie be part of Microsofts ad serving technology, another third party ad network who Facebook could sell the data to or will Facebook go it alone and set up an ad network?
It’s an opportunity for Facebook to make some serious money, although I really doubt the valuation touted by Venture Beat. $100 billion will not be seen from an online company in the near future I’d be willing to bet. The ads served through this technology will be very targetted though (potentially more than ever before), great news for those of us in online travel who suffer high CPM’s and low clickthroughs due to the lack of targetting data available currently.
Only issue with this is the prevalance of cookie blocking technology. Any ad network using this cookie will get listed on all the blocking sites and software very quickly and also the knowledge that this is happening could turn off a large amount of Facebook users very quickly.
It’s supposed to be announced on the 6th November, so I’ll reserve final judgement until then. Perhaps Double Click will be the partner of choice 
Top 50 websites by unique visitors
October 30, 2007
Compete.com have released some stats listing the top 50 website domains by unique visitors on their blog today. It makes for some interesting reading:
Yahoo is still the biggest domain in terms of unique users. Not surprising given their huge coverage, surely they have to come up with a way to make a success of all these eyeballs? They may lose out in search to Google but with such a vast web real estate finding a way to leverage that is key for them. Google however coming second is amazing considering their core is still search!
Facebook at number 21 is a bit of a surprise, I’d assumed they’d be higher given the buzz but perhaps they’ll position much higher next year (if their bubble doesn’t burst).
The growth figures in the blog post are most intersting, showing sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Digg as some of the biggest gainers (bigger even than Facebook). This certainly is the time of sharing content, something Facebook has yet to get right (they started off well but it’s lately disolved into MySpace’esque profile vanity).
Adult dating still a major growth area it would seem; the person who launches a Facebook for this domain will win big!
Of the losers, most intersting for me is the losses experienced by Expedia. This can only be down to the emergence of much better sites that give users more intuitive ways to search for flight & hotel availability. Online travel is much more competitive in that arena this year and with the move from tour operators to embrace dynamic packaging I can only see Expedia losing more eyeballs if they don’t make some significant functionality changes soon.
