Web 2.0 Think Again (5) Unearth the Value of "People"
The Web 2.0 websites know more about you than yourself.
[+] You are putting labels on yourself for everyone to see
In the first article of this series, I already mentioned that people are the only thing that Web 2.0 is trying to sell. Yet how people can become a product for sale, or, to put it in a simpler way, how information about people can produce values, which ultimately can be attached with a price?
When we realize that the core of Web 2.0 services is relation building, the way we describe people will become more diversified. For example, you may be asked to provide information such as sex, age, residence area or even annual income when you register at some websites.
Such statistics can be employed by website operators in running their businesses. For instance, content websites can analyze the age distribution of their users of different content channels, and e-commerce websites can examine the shopping frequency and expenses of users of different sexes.
Yet very often website operators would feel unsatisfied with the clarity of such information. They would only wish that users would put labels on themselves, declaring: "I am interested in whitening skincare products," "I am a fan of some pop singer," "I am obsessed with Nike sneakers." Nice and clear, and no wild guess any more.
Actually, all of us can find quite a few of these labels to describe ourselves. You can give a try as well, and I assure you that you'll end up with a lot of labels. Yet you probably don't know that these labels are very valuable and craved by many people.
Now you may want to keep these labels to yourself. Unfortunately they are already exposed. I once said that the bookmarks you
collected online and the tags you attach to your Blog articles are all descriptions about yourself instead of the "subjects" concerned. You are putting labels on yourself for everyone to see.
[+] Web 2.0 is a huge miner for personal data
Through content and tags contributed by every Web 2.0 user, it is easy to find "potential buyers for Nike sneakers" through preliminary analysis. So what would you think whether sports shoes suppliers would want such information? In a word, Web 2.0 is a huge miner for personal data.
You may say it sounds like Google's Adsense. If a Blog article contains key phrases, say, "sports shoes," then advertisements related to sports shoes would appear at the side. However, Adsense targets at Blog visitors, but what we are talking about here is Bloggers.
It's very likely that you do not know who these Blog visitors are. You show them the advertisement simply because they are viewing an article about sports shoes. Because of this correlation, you can still expect a click-through rate of above 1% over the advertisement.
Yet, the Blogger may have written 10 articles about sports shoes, which can be known from his tags. Why not target on this Blogger as well as many others, or to set up a Nike fan club specifically for this group of Bloggers?
Big Blog service providers have huge database of Blog tags or the like. In fact, you can find similar things in any Web 2.0 services
such as sharing of photo albums or bookmarks or social networking websites. The deeper you dig into the data, the higher value you'll find in the data.
In addition to user data statistics in Web 1.0 and tag analysis in Web 2.0, there are still two critical factors that lead us into an even higher level in mining the value of personal data: psychological qualities and behavioral qualities.
[+] Psychological quality indexes will soon play an important role
Birds of a feather flock together. We can tell what kind of person one is from the friends one makes. Furthermore, one's activities in a Web 2.0 website, including the number of Blogs one visits in a month, the number of messages one leaves in those Blogs and the types of tags one uses, also reveal how active one is as well as other psychological qualities.
Therefore, website operator can put a label on you accordingly, like "activity index: 8," "positiveness index: 6," "anxiety index: 3," "pressure index: 10" and so on. Here I have to point out that these psychological quality indexes will soon play an important role in Web 2.0, which develops on the basis of sociology.
Web 2.0 website operators have been managing online communities by predicting how user would interact with each other. Psychological quality indexes however are a different thing. Firstly, it's about how to quantify behaviors; secondly it needs to employ sociology to, for instance, define anxiety index.
Finally, it requires a brand new algorithm. In other words, the PageRank algorithm currently applied in search engines (to generate the importance index of a web page) can not be used to calculate complex psychological and behavioral qualities of people.
Why research on this subject? One reason is to provide a superior guidance for promoting user interaction in Web 2.0 communities; the other is to enable better targeted advertising. For example, users of a high pressure index may be a good target for "relaxing music."
[+] High precision marketing enabled by people search engines
All the top Internet companies in the world have noticed this development, but how to address it is a question. The most challenging part is the huge quantity - we are talking about tagging 100 million users with their psychological qualities and analyzing these tags. How many servers will be required to run the calculation?
Before there is any technical breakthrough, we've seen some Internet companies make their move by adopting the simplest yet most practical solution - the people search engine I mentioned earlier. Among them, Ucloo.com, the only one of the kind in China, has been running for almost three years.
The founder of Ucloo.com set up this technology-centric company because he sees the value of personal data. The company uses a program to search through web pages, collect personal data scattered everywhere and sort out the data belong to the same person.
Did you post messages on some forums? Was your name on some university recruits lists before? Have you left your mobile number or bank account number at action websites? Although you are anonymous, Ucloo.com can somehow figure out that these sets of data all refer to you.
Data such as companies you worked for, schools you studied at, classmates and colleagues you've had, stars you like, children, properties and so on, would all be collected under your name. According to the data you have made public online, Ucloo.com has put various labels on you all over.
Ucloo.com does not sell data; instead it uses data as the basis for advertising delivery. For example, if some advertiser wishes to deliver advertisements to young college grads, Ucloo.com can identify this group of targets and deliver advertisement. It has been proven that the response rate of Ucloo.com is much higher than that of traditional online advertisement.
[+] Privacy concern vs. desire to peek
People search engines have been a reality for years, with at least ten of them. Every one of them is making profits except for Spock.com, which has got funded by venture capital since last year. In addition to language, the biggest difference between
Spock.com and Ucloo.com is where they think the data should come from.
Spock.com requires users to register and at the same time provide information of your account names and passwords at MSN,
Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and other social networking websites. Its intention is to associate these accounts and consolidate the data that belongs to you.
I was very hesitant when registering at that website and wondered why I should provide all this information. Spock.com asked me my email accounts at Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo!, which I thought was outrageous.
On the other hand, Ucloo.com uses search engine technology to look for you, including photos and video files online. It is difficult to say which is better or worse, but apparently, users would feel reluctant to give away their personal data.
Users are very strange: none of them wants to be exposed by people search engine, yet each of them would try to search his
name online and see what would come out. (I bet you would go to Ucloo.com to search your name quietly before finishing reading this article.)
Is there any technical obstacle that prevents Google or Microsoft from doing the same thing? In fact anyone with deep pockets can do it. However, there is critical difference between people search engine and PageRank algorithm. Moreover, it has been years since any people search engine started to accumulate personal data. It takes time to catch up.
[+] Summary of the series
The series of "Web 2.0, think again," which one of my good friends described as groundbreaking, has come to a period here. It has been exactly a year since I published the article confessing that I had neglected Web 2.0.
Over the year I have been groping after Web 2.0 and making up for what I had missed. The five articles in the series are the
crystallization of my efforts, which I hope you find satisfactory and helpful in pointing out the trend.
Meanwhile I would like pose a question not necessarily related to business: with Web 2.0, the cost of interpersonal
communication has been declining, yet are people getting closer to one other? Maybe people are still living within their small circles and, like I said before, getting together sharing feelings with others of similar attributes?
Is the world we know growing more open or closed? Are we getting clearer about ourselves, or quite the opposite? Will there be one day when marketers know better about you than yourself?
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Prev : Web 2.0 Think Again (4) "Private Property" and "Class Inequality"
- Today in History
Web 2.0 Think Again (5) Unearth the Value of "People" - 2007/06/24
Ultimate Mobile Device (2) Competition of Handheld Game Console - 2005/06/26
