Ryan C. Miller.com – Social Media, Business & Small Things -

The Next Big Thing in Tech – Forgetting?

Posted on May 20, 2011 by MillerNo Comments

Think about how much of your life is stored online. Between your daily Facebook status updates, your ‘Likes’, emails, Google +1 recommendations, your Netflix queue and history, and your purchases via iTunes and Amazon – that’s a lot of information about you that is used not only for advertising purposes but also to make recommendations for future purposes.

Let’s think about this not from a privacy perspective because I don’t even want to go there in this post. Let’s talk relevancy. On the one hand this is a good thing in a sense – more data on things you like typically means better recommendations, more relevant ads, etc. But maybe the next big thing in search and recommendations will be algorithms that forget. Why would that be important? We change. Our tastes in music can change drastically from year to year but iTunes may still recommend you pick up the Spice Girls’ Greatest Hits because of that one night you had too much to drink and bought ‘Wannabe’.

Or will Amazon stop recommending home improvement books to you after you’ve already bought the book you need to get kitchen remodeling ideas? The project is complete, so you don’t need more home improvement books on that topic.

Or Netflix – Remember this story or how a boyfriend took revenge on his cheating girlfriend through her Netflix queue? Kind of hilarious but will she always be recommended The Scarlet Letter? Will Netflix be able to account for extraneous or false positive ratings in the future?

With so much data being recorded about our purchasing decisions and preferences companies and businesses will have to do a better job at managing customer information, taking into consideration such as life stages in addition to past purchases, and learning in some senses – to forget.

Pipl power

Posted on January 29, 2009 by MillerNo Comments

TechCrunch.com just posted an article about Pipl which is a new ‘people search’ which I just tried out.  Very Google-esque in its presentation, but the results are pretty creepy.

It crawls the ‘deep web‘ which are pages that aren’t publically linked to, as well as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr.  Doesn’t stop there.  I will also dig out news articles, blogs, mugshots, and public record documents on anyone you type in.  Granted, this is all public information, but I’ve never seen it all aggrigated into one place.

Just putting in my own information creeped me out.  For better or worse, I have a pretty common name so I wouldn’t be too high on the list unless someone knows where you live.

I just checked this out and am both impressed and scared.  I hope we enjoyed the last of our online privacy…

But in addition to all the creepiness that comes with a search engine like this hitting the masses also makes for some opportunity.

I wonder if there’s going to now be Pipl ‘optimization’ for people who want themselves to be found (thinking freelancers, musicians, blogger, etc).  So there can be a lot of good to come out of this in terms of self promoting…  Should I want to rank high in those searches to promote my blog or business, and more importantly, how does one engineer that?