Writing for The New York Times, Miguel Helft leads a fairly skeptical article on Marc Andreessen venture RockMelt with "It has been 15 years since Marc Andreessen developed the Netscape Internet browser that introduced millions of people to the Internet." (for a more nuanced picture, more or less consonant with that shorthand, see the Wikipedia article on Mosaic). Helft goes on to opine that "Mr. Andreessen appears to want a rematch" in the browser wars.
Given the current glut of browsers and that Google itself has made only a small dent in the browser market with Chrome [a rather larger dent now --D.H. May 2015], which is shipping code and not half bad by the way, it's only natural to wonder what Andreessen and company expect to accomplish. I could be wrong, as I certainly have been before, but I would expect to see either
Déjà vu I: The RockMelt team sets out to Do Browsers Right This Time. Browsers have become de facto operating systems, complete with the ability of one rogue script to grind the whole thing to a halt, so it's plausible that a redesign from a clean sheet could do better. Every time I've seen this trick tried, little things like release schedules and compatibility with the messy outside world intervene. This is a particular stumbling block for companies in the placeholder home page stage where the world is still young, clean and pretty.
Not that, say, Opera or Chrome or <your favorite browser that I'm forgetting> haven't had some measure of success, just that it's not so clear what our new protaganists are going to come up with that the dozens before them have missed.
Déjà vu II: From what I can glean from the article, RockMelt is not trying to be a general-purpose browser. Andreessen is also on the board of FaceBook and RockMelt is explicitly aimed at supporting social networking. This has a number of advantages, particularly the relative lack of competition and the chance to build on a successful existing brand.
But do I really want to use a different browser for socializing than for checking the weather? I'm probably not the right person to ask, since my social networking and my web use hardly intersect, but my personal answer would be "no". My guess is that people will either shrug and continue to use their existing browser for everything, or the new browser will offer more and more plug-ins and apps so it can act just like a regular browser. Which brings us back to item I.
Either way, I can't shake the feeling I've seen this movie before. Didn't AOL used to have its own browser or such?
[In the end, they were bought by Yahoo! in 2013, evidently not such a bad outcome for them --D.H. May 2015]
Showing posts with label AOL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AOL. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Thursday, June 12, 2008
A cautionary tale from AOL
Anyone doing research on, say, the locations of people's cell phones would have to be aware of, and keen not to repeat, the great AOL search data debacle of 2006.
I have to admit I didn't follow this closely at the time. Seemed like the kind of thing that was bound to happen sooner or later, and might happen a little less often given that AOL, despite repeated and doubtless sincere apologies, lost business and was generally humiliated for its troubles. But as fate would have it, two stories I wanted to comment on intersected exactly there. One was the piece on cell phones, and the other I'll get to in a bit.
There is certainly value in gathering anonymized bulk data and studying overall patterns. Paul Boutin has an interesting informal analysis of the AOL data, for example. Unfortunately, there are limits to how anonymous that data can be.
Anonymity depends critically on everyone being able to plausibly say "How do you know it was me? It could have been any of these people." I call this the "I'm Spartacus" effect, and it in turn depends on not giving away specific, unique data.
It turns out that people's internet searches can be very specific indeed. Sure, lots of people search for popular products, or celebrities, or any of a number of other things, but we also search for friends or acquaintances, or local businesses, or organizations we belong to or what-have-you. In the case of the AOL data, the New York Times had no trouble tracking down a lady in Georgia, who was kind enough to be interviewed, and several other searchers have also been identified.
At least one searcher, User 927, became notorious even without being identified, owing to a particularly disturbing search history, and is now the inspiration for a play of the same name. This was the other news item that led me to revisit the AOL fiasco. I haven't seen the play and doubt I will, just as I doubt User 927 will be laying claim to any of royalties.
Naturally, AOL tried to put the genie back in the bottle, and naturally it failed. The raw data is available on several sites -- you can search for them, of course -- and at least one site lets you search the searches on line. I wonder if they log that.
[The domain name for the original link for the play seems to have turned over since this was written. The link I gave now points at a banking site somewhere in Scandinavia. I've updated to an Ars Technica article on the play -- D.H. Sep 2018]
I have to admit I didn't follow this closely at the time. Seemed like the kind of thing that was bound to happen sooner or later, and might happen a little less often given that AOL, despite repeated and doubtless sincere apologies, lost business and was generally humiliated for its troubles. But as fate would have it, two stories I wanted to comment on intersected exactly there. One was the piece on cell phones, and the other I'll get to in a bit.
There is certainly value in gathering anonymized bulk data and studying overall patterns. Paul Boutin has an interesting informal analysis of the AOL data, for example. Unfortunately, there are limits to how anonymous that data can be.
Anonymity depends critically on everyone being able to plausibly say "How do you know it was me? It could have been any of these people." I call this the "I'm Spartacus" effect, and it in turn depends on not giving away specific, unique data.
It turns out that people's internet searches can be very specific indeed. Sure, lots of people search for popular products, or celebrities, or any of a number of other things, but we also search for friends or acquaintances, or local businesses, or organizations we belong to or what-have-you. In the case of the AOL data, the New York Times had no trouble tracking down a lady in Georgia, who was kind enough to be interviewed, and several other searchers have also been identified.
At least one searcher, User 927, became notorious even without being identified, owing to a particularly disturbing search history, and is now the inspiration for a play of the same name. This was the other news item that led me to revisit the AOL fiasco. I haven't seen the play and doubt I will, just as I doubt User 927 will be laying claim to any of royalties.
Naturally, AOL tried to put the genie back in the bottle, and naturally it failed. The raw data is available on several sites -- you can search for them, of course -- and at least one site lets you search the searches on line. I wonder if they log that.
[The domain name for the original link for the play seems to have turned over since this was written. The link I gave now points at a banking site somewhere in Scandinavia. I've updated to an Ars Technica article on the play -- D.H. Sep 2018]
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