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Google Patenting 'Exponential' Friend Spamming
theodp writes "'The web is better when it's social,' declared Google as it unveiled its OpenSocial initiative. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not so much, unless you're keen on giving companies the capability to 'exponentially' bombard you with advertising across all of your social networking sites. On Thursday, the USPTO published Google's patent application for Propagating Promotional Information on a Social Network, which the search giant explains 'generally relates to creating and providing promotional information (e.g., advertising, public service announcements, etc.) to users of a social network (e.g., FACEBOOK, MYSPACE, ORKUT, LINKEDIN, TWITTER, etc.).' By doing so 'across multiple social networks,' Google adds, 'the impact of the other promotional information may exponentially expand to other users of a social network."
I really don't understand what's being proposed here ... but then I guess that's probably okay just as long as I buy more pointless shit as a result.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
This is Slashdot. We have no friends!
Patent SPAM!
Sounds like a good business strategy, time to buy some Google stock, since there might be more AD revenue.
Teh google owns u a!! sukaz!!
The only way to win in this game of their design is to not play.
Game theory 101 bitches!
This is how the internet ends. Not with government censorship or technological breakdown, but with corporate sponsored spam suffocation.
Are they really trying to patent updating several social networks with the same inane post? I'm pretty sure prior art on that goes back as far as 12 year olds have been on the internet.
Now that they've patented it, all the other big players won't be able to do it and it'll be easier to adblock from one central origin.
"creating and providing promotional information"
When I first discovered the internet (in autumn 1984), it had no "promotional information" on it. No spam, no astroturfing, no tracking of your every move. It isn't clear to me what, exactly, was broken with that model, or why since then everybody has become so keen on giving away all their personal information to for-profit companies so that they even *could* be bombarded with "promotional information". Why did we start to tolerate the spam and the tracking? I never tolerated it, but a few hundred million *other* people didn't seem to mind those things...
All along I've been communicating with my friends on the internet, not to mention some people from other countries I've never met in real life but have some common hobbies or interests with. But none of that has ever required giving away my personal data to people who want to make a profit from it. It never required having my every move tracked and logged and sold to data miners. People do those things *because we let them*.
You get what you deserve. If the general public acts in a way consistent with an internet that bombards them with "exciting promotional materials" and tracks every last thing they do, that's what it's going to get. To me, that ruins the very thing that made the early internet great.
There once was a shampoo that somebody liked. And she told two friends, and they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.
they wants their PhDs back.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Patenting something just means it's an idea someone came up with. A patent is cheap and it may just be something to use in the future in case they need to defend themselves.
Give them the benefit of the doubt until they actually consider using this.
The brokenness was that for a small network it doesn't take much to keep it running, but with a huge network it costs a lot of money. You pay your ISP for access, but somebody on the other end has to pay to provide the other bit of service. For P2P type things that other party is paying their ISP, but for services like slashdot, somebody has to cover the bandwidth and various other costs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
THL phish sticks
> but for services like slashdot, somebody has to cover the bandwidth
We used to have usenet, which started out fantastic (spam free) and distributed among many sites. Eventually a bunch of assholes ruined it for everybody, but before that point it had some fantastic discussion forums.
The problem with web forums (aside from having vastly inferior UI's) is that they are a star architecture. One site has to serve up the bandwidth for every single consumer. One can imagine other architectures that don't suffer from that problem.
Of course, it doesn't help any that many modern web sites have an overhead well over 95%. To send a few KB of textual content, the javascript/etc overhead sent along with those few KB can be hundreds of KB, even some MB in extreme cases. Usenet would just send the content with the only overhead being headers and threading information.
It's clear usenet was going to die, but it isn't clear a zillion separate little web forums with their bloat and inferior UIs were the best thing to replace it.
OK, but that doesn't mean that we need services like Facebook to talk to our friends or interesting strangers. People were communicating just fine on the internet for decades before Facebook, Twitter, and so forth came along. There's no need to give up all your personal data and let yourself be logged and tracked just to communicate on the internet.
Say what you want about tracking cookies and retargeting techniques but this story has nothing to do with spam. They seem to have patented a way to server advertising to users across many social networks which could then expose those adds to friends and friends of friends of the user who first sees the ad. This isn't much different than all of your friends seeing that you have "liked" a page on facebook. Marketers bank on the hope that some of the people who see what you have just "liked" will follow the link and possibly connect with their page as well. It's voluntary and opt-in and pretty unobtrusive. I don't see what about this Google concept is different from that.
http://www.worldsoccerbars.com
If all spam goes to all of your accounts, then you know you've got a non-spam message when it only goes to one of them. Sadly not all spam will spam all of your accounts.
Slashdotters, now is your chance to direct my investment portfolio.
I misjudged the iPod ("It's crap!" I said).
I misjudged Netbooks ("They are too small, Windows Home is crap and the Atom is rubbish!" I said).
I misjudged the iPad ("C'mon, it's not really Magical!" I said.
I missed my chance to buy Goldman Sachs stock ("C'mon, people are not *that* stupid!" I said.)
Well, it's the end of a decade and the numbers are in: I am an idiot. Years of my trying have proven that I am a failure at investing. Perhaps randomly selected, total strangers who have no reason to like me will do as well or better with my money.
So tell me, ye wiser creatures, how can I make big gains from the growing stupidity of Social Networking?
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
More quality patents from American innovation. USPTO is a waste of our tax dollars. Stupid Federals.
if it only propagates when an ad is clicked. eg: If you click an ad then it also displays that ad (or similar) on your friends pages as well. It is just targeted advertising. I would rather see ads that may interest me and my friends then random ads for "smiley central" or "the facebook of sex".
Make 10 copies of this post and mail to your friends ...
i thought that would be bigger news.