
Why 3 Startups Are Betting That You'll Want to Stream Your Browser History - acconrad
http://mashable.com/2011/02/18/clickstream-data-sharing/
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trotsky
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?

~~~
fleitz
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"

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redorb
Didn't the Russians go broke by underestimating?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Faltering_Soviet_syste...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Faltering_Soviet_system)

~~~
fleitz
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.

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markszcz
"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.

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

~~~
absconditus
You may not, but many people seek attention.

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

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carlygeehr
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...

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

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aheilbut
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.

