Archive for the 'Customer 2.0' Category

Customer 2.0 : I own my privacy

Published
by
Will Rowan
on September 5, 2007
in Customer 2.0, community, ethics, marketing, privacy and web 2.0
. 0 Comments

Have you seen rapleaf ?
or upscoop
oh and there’s quechup as well - which has some of plaxo’s worst habits (which plaxo quickly shed),

It’s Spam 2.0 - the start of the social spam revolution.

I’ve seen conversations on 2 separate professional networks that are apalled by them & the loss of privacy that’s implicit - for example, I now know what’s on one of my client’s Amazon Wish Lists. Which I guess is OK if you actually know somebody… but not OK if you’ve scraped an email address & set out to learn anything you can about a person for who-knows-what purpose.

The only defence is to use separate public & personal email addresses - and even that would be defeated by viral tools in these services’ signup processes.

Oh, and Facebook just announced that it’s opening public profiles to search engines - so expect an outrage in 5-6 weeks time. And then folk will adjust and go back to their lives, on & offline.

But the cumulative effect will be for the ’signal to noise’ ratio to drop - the proportion of genuine messages will reduce, amongst an increase of social spam.

All these rape our privacy.

Expect to see more folk using closed communities (like Phuser ), and the ‘private’ options on Facebook et al. Bit by bit we’ll learn to take control of our own privacy, and take responsibility for our privacy.

That’s the service that Rapleaf offer: to protect & control your privacy. I’m in two minds as to whether they’ll profit from exposing the problem (which they didn’t create…) Or if they’ll be a victim of their own success at exposing a genuine social problem.

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Collaboration, customer, community

Published
by
Will Rowan
on August 4, 2007
in Customer 2.0, Digital Thinking, community, marketing and web 2.0
. 0 Comments

TomTom GO 520 satellite navigation toy allows customers to update maps while driving, correcting their device’s information with what’s actually on the road. And then, of course to upload that update to a community, in exchange for corrections from other users.

Potentially this lifts the huge burden of updates from mapmakers - when TomTom and other satellite navigation manufacturers achieve a critical mass of customers. Service providers’ role changes to ‘verification’ rather than sourcing the update information, which is always a delayed process. Presumably, over time, an agreed verification standard will establish how often a map error needs to be reported before it’s considered verified.And the next step is to have this information reported back live from the vehicle, rather than delayed, from the owner’s office. That would allow for routing around roadworks that might cause delay for a few hours.

/ edit

Yesterday in Berlin TomTom announced their updated range all of which include Map Share. The range includes TomTom GO 920T and a 3d generation TomTom One

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Long overdue closure of allofmp3

Published
by
Will Rowan
on July 3, 2007
in Customer 2.0 and Music Morphs
. 0 Comments

Russia shuts down Allofmp3.com - Times Online
Frankly, it’s surprising that it’s taken so long! My “march of the clones” post last october noted that allofmp3 were testing an alternative service - allTunes - which still seems to be functional.

And in true web-stylee… the same company has launched MP3Sparks.com

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Slow down to hurt spammers

Published
by
Will Rowan
on July 3, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

Canadian email marketing company MailChannels has hit on a cracking way to hurt spammers - by slowing down the handshake between email programmes: Traffic Control Since spammers need to send huge volumes of email, they can’t wait…. so move on elsewhere. Which must help cut costs for MailChannels (since they don’t have so much bandwidth stolen by spammers), which in turn will help give legitimate customers a better service.

I expect that by partnering with Cloudmark, there’s a network effect too.

great job.

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Real news!

Published
by
Will Rowan
on July 3, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

I missed the Guardian’s coverage of Mika Brzezinski who refused to read a non-story as the morning news lead. I couldn’t agree more: somewhere we need to draw a line between news and celebrity hype (& sports “news” too, for that matter.)

Given the proliferation of tv channels, and the about-to-be-spectacular growth of internet tv viewing, shouldn’t there be separate channels for celebrity “news”: rolling coverage of “stories” as they break, just as there is for news and sports?

That way the celeb stuff could be kept clean out of the way of real news.

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Build your own webpage, part 2

Published
by
Will Rowan
on July 2, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

I finally found time to view Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC, and noted the inclusion of Webclips in Apple’s forthcoming Leopard OS: it’s a neat way of capturing any (?!) part of a webpage, and creating your own customisable widget.

And if you think of a Mac’s widget screen as a web Home page, then WebClip is doing much the same role as Zude.

/update  I’ve been invited to the private Beta (thanks guys!)

First impressions to follow in a few days….

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microblogging

Published
by
Will Rowan
on July 2, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

I hadn’t noticed Pownce until I noticed that it’s now available on Facebook:  but since the Pownce blog only started on June 28th, maybe I’m not too far off the pace!

’tis a pretty thing - and carries ads in the free version.

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Pricing history

Published
by
Will Rowan
on July 2, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

A nice feature on NexTag’s shopping comparison engine - just a simple little graph showing the price trend of a product.

File under transparency!

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beyond Pageflakes… drag ‘n’ drop pages

Published
by
Will Rowan
on June 29, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

The wise folk at Ericsson have a mantra: “make it easy to buy”.

Pageflakes has a built-in hurdle to making their service easy to buy - not everybody gets RSS. Pages without rss feeds are a pain to add. iGoolge does a great job of simplifying the process, but if a page hasn’t got a feed, it’s not easy to add.

Zude does away with that hurdle, removing any need to understand how the tech works under the hood.

Readers can become editors: imagine, you’re a football fan.
If you like youtube’s tagged coverage of your team, and the fanzine’s blog, and The Sun & Guardian Unlimited’s sports coverage, you’d drag ‘n’ drop them all into one page.

This sets a new standard, and will be the new, newest thing - probably in reaching mass media in 2008. (Widgets are the new, newest thing for 2007)

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nextGoogle

Published
by
Will Rowan
on June 28, 2007
in Customer 2.0
. 0 Comments

Great report on forthcoming developments from Google:
Google’s Marissa Mayer on The Future of Search

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