Microsoft is in talks to buy Claria, the adware/spyware house formerly known as Gator. Claria makes the pop up software that comes bundled with a lot of freeware, estimated to be on 40 million computers. They track all your online actions, and tailor the ads to you.
“We think the space is important; we’re interested in the idea of deeply personalized and customized Web experiences that increase the relevancy of the information people get,” according to a Microsoft representative. But the representative added that the company, in whatever it does, will set rigorous controls around its products and services that give people the choice to opt in or out or restrict data that’s collected.
I’m sure the New, Careful M$ will provide safeguards of some sort. With their usual hard to use and confusing interfaces and with more security holes then Swiss Cheese.
And don’t think the Amerikan Government won’t do anything about a spyware/adware company invading your privacy, they did, by rewarding a company exec with a position on the Dept. of Homeland Security’s privacy board:
In an e-mail message to CNET News.com, Kelly defended the inclusion of a Claria representative on the committee. “I am proud of, supportive of and grateful for those individuals in the public and private sector who are willing to take on the hard tasks, fight the good fight, and who surprise us with creative, fresh and unconventional thinking, and who make change where change is needed through their hard work and personal dedication,” Kelly said.
Claria bundles its pop-up advertising software with ad-supported networks such as Kazaa. Recently, the privately held company has been trying to seek credibility by following stricter privacy guidelines and offering behavioral profiling services to its partners.
Those hard tasks and good fights being spying on your online activity, loading your machine with annoying pop up ads and modeling your behavior.)
M$ is also building a RSS engine directly into the next version of it’s operating system, as developer Nick Bradbury reports:
Microsoft’s plans are two-fold: to extend RSS so that it handles lists, and to provide a common feed subscription list and data store that can be shared among applications running on the same desktop. I believe both of these are a good thing, and I’ve offered my hand to Microsoft to help them develop these in a way that benefits everyone (including you).
In other words, I’m going to trust Microsoft. I believe companies – like people – can change, and I’ve seen plenty of signs that Microsoft has indeed changed. Unlike Google, Microsoft has joined the conversation via blogs and RSS. Hell, the fact that Scoble still has his job suggests that they’re a changed company!
So, I’m going to take them at their word that they’ll develop RSS support in a way that’s open, and I hope that I’m not singing “Won’t Get Fooled Again” a year or two down the road. But by trusting Microsoft, I’m also trusting them with your attention, and I don’t want to speak for you without explaining what I believe this is about, and then hearing your opinion on it.
All of this built in, automatically finding out what your reading via RSS and possibly reporting back to M$. After saying that M$ specifically didn’t mention search, Bradbury goes on to posit how this could be used for personalized searching, a Google killer. Which they certainly mentioned in the Claria article quoted above. Cue The Who, Nick!
(Everyone is looking into personal search of some sort, Yahoo has new social search feature, My Web 2.0, that integrates your friends searching patterns and info into your search results. It’s interesting that the more things change the more they stay the same. Back in the 90’s MIT’s Firefly provided some of this functionality. back then the buzz word was Agents, now it’s Web Services.)
Now Attention.xml is a big thing right now in certain circles. It’s seen as a way to deal with information overload, cut the glut and get to meat. But there doesn’t seem to be any client software that makes use of it now. From the Wiki:
How many sources of information must you keep up with?
Tired of clicking the same link from a dozen different blogs?
RSS readers collect updates, but with so many unread items, how do you know which to read first?
Attention.XML is designed to to solve these problems and enable a whole new class of blog and feed related applications.
So while Attention.xml co founder Steve Gillmor has lamented lately that no one is interested in his spec, it turns out everyone is interested–just in extending, enhancing and locking in the results for purposes other then what he originally envisioned.
The 90’s saw the battle for the browser. The 2000’s will see the battle for Attention and Interest, in the Orwellian tracking of everything you do online, not to make your life any easier, but to better target you with advertising. This is several levels up from the search based ads that Google uses and offers for blogs. Stay tuned for more, this is just the beginning.
