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Google Seeking "FriendRank" Patent
theodp writes "In its just-published patent application for Network Node Ad Targeting, Google hatches plans for identifying the most influential of a circle of friends and providing this 'influencer' with 'financial incentives from advertisers in exchange for permission to display advertisements on the member's [social network] profile' (sound familiar, Jeremy?). Doing so will 'provide advertisers with the option of targeting either all members in the community or advertising only on the profile of the influencer, thereby targeting the entire community,' explains Google. Who says you can't buy friendship!"
Great. So now when Viacom sues Google they'll not only get viewership information, they'll know all the relationships between those viewers too.
For every innovative google algorithm there is an equal and opposite new type of spamming technique created.
It's called "marketing" - on the job interview. Never say "spam".
A friend of mine was interviewing at a giant junk mail company. during the interview, they took him into this room that showed their "Products". He exclaimed, "I never seen so much junk mail in my life!"
The interviewer, in a terse voice, "That's DIRECT MARKETING!"
He still got the job.
I think this could go a long way, although I sure hope my friends don't get into it.
He's got a point here, and this presents a simple solution:
1) allow Google to pay you to display ads.
2) Teach all your friends to install and use Adblock, thus ensuring they don't actually see the ads.
3) Profit!
IANAL so I don't know if this applies but Stanley Milgram's small world experiment sounds very similar. This is where the 6 degrees of separation idea came from. Basically social networks consists of spokes and hubs. Hubs are basically popular people who knows everyone in their area and these hubs allow people to be connected with other people in other areas, ensuring that people are never separated by more than 6 hops. Think of these as routers but for people. Isn't Google's "influential" people the same thing? I mean once you have a graph of a social network, the hubs are pretty obvious. Where's the originality in this concept?
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As usual, a one-paragraph description of a patent covers exactly the parts that are prior art without actually pointing out the new parts.
The novel bits include:
* Being able to advertise things based on the profile of your friends. You may have forgotten to put "skydiving" in your list of interests, but if a dozen of your friends also have "skydiving", you might be in the target market.
* Saving money by advertising only to certain valuable people, not just those with interests but those who know a lot of others with those interests. Why pay for 1,000 ad impressions when 10 would do?
Patents are hard to read, but I recommend skipping the abstract and the claims and going ahead to the description. You'll learn a lot more.
People with a lot of friends on social networking sites probably don't have all that much influence. These are people who agree to be friends with whomever asks them, and will spam people with friend requests. I see pages with "8,000 friends!", and think "uh, no. This guy does not not know 8,000 people personally or well enough to influence their decisions".
What this promises to do is make people think "Wow, if I have lots of friends on my page, I can make some money!", so I can expect a marked increase in unsolicited friend requests from people I don't know.
Not true. My girlfriend has thousands of friends on MySpace and other networking sites, almost all artists or those who appreciate the arts. She's sold original paintings worth thousands of dollars through such, generated interest in live events she's participating in, and met several people who turned into IT clients of ours. The effort invested to create that network has paid off handsomely. Can't see her selling out to any of Googles scumbag clients though... all that would achieve is to sabotage the value of what she's created.
At the end of the day, the reason these mediums are working is because people are actively rejecting anything that comes from a corporate source due to a lack of trust. That's why the corporations want to obscure themselves through schemes such as these. Won't work though... people are too sophisticated, and when they realize what's going on, they'll actively reject any message that comes from an individual who demonstrates their willingness to participate in such as this.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth