Just say no to interface cruft

February 10, 2010

Just read this post by Andrew Parker (who, along with his colleague Eric Friedman, has helped me out more times than I can count) about Google Buzz’s location within the GMail interface. Andrew thinks the location in the GMail interface is the thing that’ll make Google Buzz a killer feature, like GChat. I think it’s [...]

Read the full article →

Location-based ads & Apple exclusivity

February 5, 2010

Apple recently published a developer tip that said applications accessing location information primarily for advertising targeting would be rejected – applications had to provide users with ‘beneficial information’. Gizmodo picked up on it, and claimed – referencing a tweet from Craig Hockenberry – that Apple would be keeping location-based advertising for itself, no doubt powered [...]

Read the full article →

Implications of Ghostery acquisition

January 21, 2010

A couple of days ago, the regulatory compliance firm Better Advertising announced that it had acquired the web-bug-tracking Firefox addon Ghostery. It got mentioned in a couple places but was under-discussed, given its potential importance. Ghostery as a Firefox extension is important because it has an opt-in database of web bug usage, collected from its [...]

Read the full article →

Since people asked

January 5, 2010

A few friends have asked what I thought of Apple’s purchase of Quattro, so here it is. Personal opinion only, and worth what you pay for it. I believe the acquisition is primarily about iPhone and iPod Touch applications. Linking this to adware OS patents, as some commenters have done, is a mistake. It’s partially [...]

Read the full article →

Layers of trust

November 17, 2009

On the CPM Advisors blog, Rob points out that IFRAME ad calls are worth less to the advertiser than JavaScript calls: there’s no referrer and therefore no insight into the location of the inventory, no ability to do contextual analysis on the page, and no ability to serve expandable or coordinated ad units. Rob suggests [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →