Watching the watchmen

By Ian, on July 28th, 2006

Yesterday, I spoke with Mark Opzoomer. Mark was the MD of Yahoo! Europe between 2001 and 2003. Now he’s involved in a number of ventures, but I was talking to him about his participation with Garlik. Garlik is set to launch as an online privacy service later this year. The idea is that they’ll scour the web looking for the information that’s stored about you or connected with you: your old MySpace profile, those posts you made to a newsgroup and the items stored in other public databases. Having compiled a report, they’ll give you an option to try to have your tracks erased or hidden. “People don’t realise quite how much you can discover about themselves from public sources. We want to raise that awareness and also hand back a little control.”

I asked him about MySpace’s apparent victory over Yahoo! in the recent Hitwise ratings. “Well, MySpace should make around $350mn in sales revenue this year. Yahoo! will make about $4bn. That’s quite a difference. And it means that Yahoo! will have the investment opportunity to add better content and services.“

“The social networks have a real problem with advertising. That’s especially true with brand advertising because the advertiser has no control over the context in which their brand appears. That makes them very anxious. The networks need to do two things. First they need to develop tools that are able to interpret what is on the page before they show the advertisement. Otherwise, you’re putting credit card applications on pages belonging to eight-year olds, which doesn’t make sense for anyone. This intelligent interpretation of the page content and the behaviour of users will also be driven by the child safety lobby. It is possible to observe the behaviour of users to pinpoint the behaviour of predatory adults. They’ll need to be doing this in the background anyway, so if it also gives them more information about who visits which pages then that can also help them with advertising.

“Second, they need to develop areas of interest — sports, music, gaming, etc. — that will provide advertisers with the possibility of choosing more carefully the area where their copy appears. At the moment, all the users are lumped together and that isn’t appealing or useful to advertisers. More granularity is key. To go back to Yahoo!, if you think about the Yahoo! Finance page or the cars sections, then having those sections are useful for users and advertisers. Users know where to go to get information on certain topics. Advertisers will know where their copy is most relevant. And users will accept relevant advertising, especially in a free service. I can also see a move towards more localised services, with networks that are devoted to your local community.”

So where are we going? What’s web 3.0 going to be like? “The semantic web is coming. The words on a page will intelligently link and record themselves to create a much more seamless experience. At the moment, you have to apply a lot of human intelligence, but it’s the hope that as the web evolves, it will start adding intelligence of its own.” But that’s some way off, I argue, with different microformats in competition. “Sure,” says Mark, “there’s a lot of miles to go. In the meantime, we’ll see a big extension of the things that are happening now. More participation, better ease of use, greater use of communities.”