This hack can only tell you what sites a user has visited out of a list of sites you specify. A general ad platform based on this hack would presumably have a list of sites to query against, acting as a litmus test for determining a user's interests and socioeconomic status. I would argue that such a list would be difficult to compose (javascript/JSON size vs. generality vs. granularity) and no better than the cookie / flash cookie / geo IP lookup technologies currently being employed by doubleclick and others. Such a list would necessarily have to target sites in the top 500 whereas networks like doubleclick can mine niche sites that may serve as better indicators of a user's true behavioral profile.
It's not necessarily quite that bad. The list can be made modular.
One option would be to start of with a list of the top 500 sites and then determine from that information what demographic the user fits it. Then you could load a list of sites pertaining to that demographic and further narrow down the user's behavior.
Also, if you're talking about ads on a certain site, the publisher can make a list of the sites in their niche and then you could load that list and move on from there.
All in all, this has some very interesting potential. The question is, why hasn't Google done it already?
They have. I'm pretty sure Doubleclick does this. Without the CSS hack though(using the cookie method).
The CSS hack is only worthwhile if you don't have the kind of data sources that the big guys have. If this technique actually made money, you would probably want to sign up for something like Lookery or RightMedia because they'd get you better results.
Apart the visited link way there are also other means of achieving the same result even working server side. Check out this paper http://wozad.com/docs/sp3.pdf ,it's covering also the privacy issues.
but hang on, before you get all up in arms about privacy and rights, this is a possible google adsense / adwords killer and there is going to blood shed before privacy gets in the way of profits.
This is the second post I've seen from wozad.com where clicking on the headline simply leads to their top-level site (where they try to sell you their service). Smells like spam to me.
Your logic is self-serving, don't you think? You have no history of contributing to HN discussion besides posting your company link twice. A post title has little to do with the quality of content on the other side. I think people ignored it for a reason. Not to mention, how is this that much different from Schill's random hack back in 2006?
Yes you are right,i should not have linked the post to the main page, this might look a bit rude.Anyway i do think that this application has some kind of value to share. And as i already commented the feedback of this community is very important for us. Finally our methodology is much more extended from the "random hack" you talk about, that random hack is something coded in one evening just to give a proof-of-concept.
i do think that you do not know the word Spam, a duplicate post isn't spam. I've explained why i duplicated and i won't be posting more. My purpose was to get feedback from the community. You might believe that i'm stupid enough to think that i can my business fly by advertising here, well, this is not exactely true. Anyway thanks for your comment.
well, everybody here misunderstood the meaning of this post. It wasn't get instant userbase, but instead get the feedback of hacker news community. This is partly achieved and i say thanks to everybody who partecipated in this discussion.
