Thursday, August 18, 2005
Advertising on 43 Things
I just registered for an account on 43 Things, a system that allows you to publish your life goals and share insights and encouragement with others who share them. It seems cute and even kind of revolutionary in the way that much social software is, but it's supported by ad revenue. I started thinking about why this might not be such a hot idea, and then got my answer when I added my goal to "stop surfing the web at work" and landed on a page with this ad along the side:
This is the problem with contextual ads: perversity and exploitation. (Will they show ads for bargain cigarettes to people who want to "stop smoking"?) It is also the problem with using ads to pay for a service that could easily be hosted on a distributed network of servers using free software and idle bandwidth and CPU cycles. I don't want to put my information -- including the social context in which it's embedded -- into the hands of a private corporation, who can shut the site down and sell off the database whenever they like. If I invest my time and trust in this kind of community, I want to make sure that the participants retain control over their information and their links to others in the community; I would also like them to be able to add new features without relying on a single developer at the center of the web. Open standards, open architectures, free software. This is the only way to do things in the 21st century.
Therefore, I will probably not be participating in the 43 Things community.
Advertisements
Surfing The Web At Work
Leave no trace. Proxify the web. Get 6 months of access for $20
This is the problem with contextual ads: perversity and exploitation. (Will they show ads for bargain cigarettes to people who want to "stop smoking"?) It is also the problem with using ads to pay for a service that could easily be hosted on a distributed network of servers using free software and idle bandwidth and CPU cycles. I don't want to put my information -- including the social context in which it's embedded -- into the hands of a private corporation, who can shut the site down and sell off the database whenever they like. If I invest my time and trust in this kind of community, I want to make sure that the participants retain control over their information and their links to others in the community; I would also like them to be able to add new features without relying on a single developer at the center of the web. Open standards, open architectures, free software. This is the only way to do things in the 21st century.
Therefore, I will probably not be participating in the 43 Things community.
