Spying On Myself (continued)

I wrote the initial Spying On Myself post in January of this year.  I outlined why I think spying on yourself is a developing trend in web services.  It’s a theme I intend to keep tracking.

I took the time to read Seth Goldstein’s post on /Vaultstock today. This was a meeting of about 30 people who are using a /Vault from Root.net to track their Internet clickstream.  I wasn’t at /Vaultstock but I do have a /Vault and here is a view of it from earlier today:

Root_vault_1

As you may be able to see (sorry that the picture is hard to read), my top web destination is none other than this blog, followed by Amazon, Yahoo! search, and Flickr.  Two ad servers also make the list, Doubleclick and Atlas.

Seth’s post is interesting reading as it talks about where all of this is headed.  My favorite line is from r0ml Lefkowitz, Chief Scientist of Root.net who said:

At the other side of each commercial interaction you have there is a
company’s CRM database maintaining a record.  What would happen if you
had access to a copy of this data and could share, for example, your
Barnes and Noble purchase history with Amazon, or your Costco purchase
history with Wal-Mart?

That maps pretty well with what Charlie is looking for, which is the ability to show his entire clickstream when visiting ecommerce sites to obtain a better personalization and recommendation experience.

This is all interesting stuff and I am excited to be using a /Vault and learning more about my web usage habits.  Hopefully there will be interesting applications of all of this shortly.

#VC & Technology