Corporate Espionage & Social Network - Ramblings
I believe that this is an example of corporate espionage, as in a William Gibson short story, or something from the Shadowrun universe.
This kind of data would be invaluable to an insurance company, or even to a marketing company.
I think we are on the verge of entering into a privacy-free way of living. Livejournal, and similar blogging sites, and the bloom of social networking sites demonstrate that people are ready to embrace a controlled form of life without privacy. The money in these ventures is in the potential information-harvest. For example, Facebook is probably worth 5 times what it was bought for when they figure out how to implement a good direct-sales scheme.
Ebay... Amazon. A plugin "program" for Facebook could destroy them. A smart algorithm could calculate likely purchases by relying on friends interests & purchases, much the way google's pagerank system supposedly works. Utilizing a backbone like Me.dium hooked into a suite of similar shopping programs (like the vampire/slayer/zombie/werewolf frontends) you could even have people "go shopping" realtime. All of the programs to turn a social website into a goldmine for a retailer exist. The hard work is in putting them together while avoiding seeming intrusive.
This kind of data would be invaluable to an insurance company, or even to a marketing company.
I think we are on the verge of entering into a privacy-free way of living. Livejournal, and similar blogging sites, and the bloom of social networking sites demonstrate that people are ready to embrace a controlled form of life without privacy. The money in these ventures is in the potential information-harvest. For example, Facebook is probably worth 5 times what it was bought for when they figure out how to implement a good direct-sales scheme.
Ebay... Amazon. A plugin "program" for Facebook could destroy them. A smart algorithm could calculate likely purchases by relying on friends interests & purchases, much the way google's pagerank system supposedly works. Utilizing a backbone like Me.dium hooked into a suite of similar shopping programs (like the vampire/slayer/zombie/werewolf frontends) you could even have people "go shopping" realtime. All of the programs to turn a social website into a goldmine for a retailer exist. The hard work is in putting them together while avoiding seeming intrusive.