Social Networking: Better Late then Never ?

For a long time I have been too lazy on social networks.
I decided to come out of hibernation and become active on orkut and facebook.

My Friends if you read the blog find me on orkut,facebook.

I get why people get hooked on to these sites.
It s kind of fun actually to track your friends find out what they are upto
and discover new friends.

I am looking forward to the SC game tonight.
Waiting to see our Q.B Booty has improved from last year.

In the season I am looking forward to SC vs Cal and SC vs Oregon.
I believe these are going to be make or break games for us.

Signing Off, Fight On !

Ravi

Social Networking and Monetizing them

Social Networks have always intrigued me.
They are great now I can keep in touch with friends,family,coworkers,discover ppl etc

Facebook,MySpace,LinkedIn,Orkut etc are great and useful sites.
Also Ning now allows anyone to create their own social network.

One thing about social networks that intrigues me is revenue generation.

The CPC,CPA etc methods work fine with click based systems.

Having worked with SEM Systems and also Local Search Engines I think we need
to have better systems for monetizing social networks.

Pretty soon I believe we will see behaviour targeting on social networks.
They will not just look for keywords but also look at our friends,interests,actions to determine which Ads to serve.

Maybe we will see different types of ads, widgets may serve the function of dynamic ads.

An Interesting article about this topic.

Fox Interactive Media NYTimes Article

One thing of note is that there are going to be privacy concerns especially with the way we can target users on social networks.

A personalization dream a privacy nightmare?

I believe we can still reap the benefits of personalization and protect our privacy.

Remains to be seen who is going to be the first one to one to come with something similar to
Google AdSense for Social Networks.

Let me know if you see interesting things in this space.

Late Night Blogging, Time to Sleep

Ravi

Personalization vs Privacy

This topic has always been of particular interest to me.

This ties to my research interests and here goes........



As we see companies like Yahoo,Google,Amazon provide better user experience and
benefits through personalization on one front, we start looking at the privacy concerns.


Can we provide personalization benefits while still honoring user privacy concerns?

As an example lets say I login to Gmail, use Google Search, Blog using Blogger,Picassa for pictures. Orkut for social networking,etc.......the list goes on, Google will have a more complete
picture of me. This would allow more targeted advertising, provide me better search results......



I do see the picture that personalization has very useful benefits. However what If I didnot
want all my activities to be linked, I would not want by blog to be tied to what I search.
Can I selectively Opt Out ?



I think we need to provide consumers the choice on what they want to be tracked and what they
dont want to be tracked. Also technically we should have obfuscation methods, opt out techniques for users to make the decisions



Also privacy violation is a huge liability for companies.
This should encourage them to work more closely with users to create a good user
experience while honoring their privacy concerns.


So in short I think we should start looking at technology to restrict what technology can do and provide users the CHOICE on how their information is tracked.



Here's a link to my research paper

http://www.isr.uci.edu/pep06/papers/PEP06_Chellappa.pdf


Let me know your thoughts on this.