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Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#22I think the concept is good hypothetically, but wouldn't work in practice. People are not that organized. Knowing beforehand where you are going to go and what you are going to do at various points in the future is hard enough to imagine, let alone consistently input into a computer, even if there is a value proposition as he points out. That's my thinking anyway.
This is exactly why systems like this never work out. One could argue that to-do apps like Remember the Milk would have cashed in on this if there was really a market for it. The problem is that, for most of us, our lives are the result of goals and objectives and a healthy dose of luck and randomness.
Like that old commercial pointed out, very few children say they want to "claw my way to middle management" despite the fact that's what happens to a lot of us.
I would expect a service like this to fail partly because people aren't that organized and partly because those that are would be underwhelmed by how things turn out. Nobody likes a service that makes you feel like a failure.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#23Content is value, a lot of wall statuses are spontaneous, video links, cute articles, what is happening. That makes people come and stick around. The plan is useful, but not that sticky for people to see any changes.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#24"Likewise, your credit card company and the phone company have records of what you did, as opposed to what you plan to do next."
Sorry to bust your bubble, but your CC company has already given talks about how it knows when you are about to move, when you plan on getting a divorce, when you are trying to have a baby, when you got actually going to have a baby and plenty of other personal thing... I can only imagine how fun it would be to sift CC data for patterns and cash in on what I find. A calendar of things I WANT to do isn't useful, what is valuable is what I WILL be doing.
I really want to build a factory five GTM super car and will happily put it on my want to do next year, but in reality unless someone pays me to built one for them I can't do it for a while. Once my CC starts seeing car parts they will know that it is actually something I am doing and not something I would like to do. For now my CC company knows last weekend I rented a truck, bought some house supplies and changed my address from Chelmsford to Waltham. Now would be a perfect time to sell that information to local resistants and shops that are around my new house. Or seeing as the new address is a recently purchased house now would be the time to sell that info to the home repair stores which I have not already started going to.
Edit: Anyone in the CC industry allowed to comment further on this topic? No doubt it would be a neat place to work.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#25[deleted]
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#26Telling the world what you did and are doing assumes the world cares. This is a stretch, but people do it. Not only telling the world what you are planning on doing, but expecting guidance from peers even more optimistic. I don't see this often in facebook status updates, or at least not things that people can really expect help from like Adams envisions. Displaying your intentions puts all your cards on the table; i…
Telling the world what you did and are doing assumes the world cares.
Facebook status stream:
"Waiting in line. It's going slow"
"Eating a burrito, no cheese"
"Ate a burrito... I think the no cheese will pay off"
"Low on gas, going to fill up"
"Can I use my cellphone if I'm just using Facebook at the gas station?"
"Just in case you're wondering, I didn't blow up at the gas station. Still here"
"I like to do it on the dog house"
People no longer care if the world cares. I don't think we really know anymore what is biologically encouraged is discouraged. Biology has never been here.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#27"Likewise, your credit card company and the phone company have records of what you did, as opposed to what you plan to do next." Sorry to bust your bubble, but your CC company has already given talks about how it knows when you are about to move, when you plan on getting a divorce, when you are trying to have a baby, when you got actually going to have a baby and plenty of other personal thing... I can only imagine h…
I don't work for a CC company, but I did work with predictive analytics regarding churn in mobile phone and cable companies a decade ago. It's not hard to back-mine the data to establish certain patterns that happen before major events. That's how we predicted churn at a major provider (rhymes with "Blecks-dell") with 90% accuracy. There's no reason that same logic could apply to a rich data set like CC transactions. The tricky part is defining what "events" you want to detect, then getting a set of data with those events for training on the network.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#28"You're worried that this system allows the stalkers and mooches in your network to ruin your future plans. But remember, you are only broadcasting your plans to people you specify. If you choose to tell a stalker where you'll be, don't blame the application when you get stabbed."
Getting stabbed would be my own fault, but being afraid to post plans in fear of getting stabbed is certainly the application's fault.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#29This is what Google does. What you search is becoming a better and better predictor of what you will do. Most searches are based on future plans, purchase, or interests. They even know your current and future locations if you use google maps for directions. If you use gmail, Google can tell that you just broke up with your girlfriend, or are graduating college. Sidenote: we don't "give away" this information. We exch…
Ironically, the "French Crush" commercial directly advertised this transaction. Play cute music against a cute story and highlighting the fact that you can be very accurately understood and predicted based on Google searches becomes heartwarming.
Re: Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer
#30This is what Google does. What you search is becoming a better and better predictor of what you will do. Most searches are based on future plans, purchase, or interests. They even know your current and future locations if you use google maps for directions. If you use gmail, Google can tell that you just broke up with your girlfriend, or are graduating college. Sidenote: we don't "give away" this information. We exch…
I have thought about this idea of broadcasting my plans for a while now. Everybody is saying that google's adsense is the biggest breakthrough in advertising in years. Think about the potential of being able to register that you are thinking about buying a car and then only seeing car commercials. I'm not talking about just adsense on the right margin of webpages but even in your tv shows and radio programs on the way into work. Or being able to say "Hey I'm overweight I want to ban all ads for unhealthy food and or alcohol across the board!".
Currently I'm thinking of remodeling my kitchen; I would love to only see ads for local companies that can do this. I mean sometimes I spend my free time researching which computer I want to buy. I can't imagine that companies wouldn't want to take advantage of this and put in custom ads for me.
I realize that this would represent a shift of power from the ad agencies to the consumer but so be it. I think the companies buying ads would benefit from more targeted advertisements.