The Long Road to Relevance
Today, I revisited Plaxo which has a lot of promise because of its focus on contact data, while LinkedIn focuses on connections. I have yet to dig deep into it again, but I did come across the funniest thing. Plaxo decided to show Google Adsense on my dashboard, and you can’t beat the relevance!
Take a look:
I wonder why they would show me an ad for pole dancing, bay area condos, bay area shuttles and for video production. WEIRD! Maybe Google is trying to suggest something or has confused me for Scott Banister, founder of Ironport (also on the board at Slide and was on the board of Paypal), who is launching a new adult social network. I’m not exactly sure why these ads would show except the fact that Plaxo may be based out of the bay area.
Google Adsense’s relevance engine currently uses a mixture of my personal browsing history and the context of the current pages. I don’t believe I was searching for strip clubs in San Jose nor was the Plaxo page containing any content for pole dancing.
The amount of untapped relevance data in applications on the Internet is striking. Plaxo can see that a lot of my friends are in the Southern California area and that I have a Los Angeles area code. Isn’t that enough to eliminate the Bay Area advertising? What is absolutely necessary are ad engines that can tap the internal data stored within a consumer application.
There is clearly a long road ahead for optimizing relevance in online advertising.
UPDATE 8/23/2007:
Facebook will now use profile data to target advertising. Read more.
