The product is called “Feedly,” and it’s available right here for that shiny new Firefox 3 browser you just downloaded.

Feedly rather humbly bills itself as an “attempt … to create a more social and magazine-like start page.” It’s a browser plug-in that delivers the Web 2.0 version of what we used to call a “portal” back in the day, the home page that kicks off your journey through cyberspace each time you start your browser. There are more than a few of these things out in the world already, most of which leverage Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to compile content from disparate sources on the Web into a single interface. There are great introductions to RSS already, so I’ll skip that to focus on what it all means for the advertising business.

What it means, gentle reader, is that the space where the vast majority of promotional spending is nestled cozily right now is starting to disappear like arctic coastline. Don’t see it? Skeptical? Let me explain.

Generally speaking we’ve always thought of “free” media as being enabled by the marriage of content and advertising. Newspapers paid reporters to write stories, and the money came from auto dealers who wanted to put pictures of Abraham Lincoln next to those stories. Broadcast television networks paid producers for video of people eating tarantula parts, and the money came from pharmaceutical companies who wanted to air clips of affectionate older couples in wheat fields between leg courses. Web publishers paid their own pizza delivery guys, with change from ad networks eager to tell users they’d just “WON!” next to the blog entries on their sites. You get the picture.

The system worked. Life was good.

Then one day the newspapers and the broadcast networks realized they could put the stories and video they’d already paid for on the Web. Ad networks, who of course wanted to tell people they’d won next to that stuff as well, paid the newspapers and the broadcast networks for the privilege of doing so.

Soon nearly all the stories and all the video were on the Web, next to the blog entries that had been there all along. And next to all that stuff was Abe Lincoln; couples in wheat fields, and opportunities for users to win, refinance and connect with their high school sweethearts, hopefully in that order.

Eventually, there was so much stuff online users could no longer process it all. They got tired of roaming the Web, wandered less frequently to places they’d never been, and hunkered down in their familiar online hangouts like mall rats in a food court. It was still possible to get traffic to a new Web site, but it began to cost money. You had to advertise in the food court. Which is great if you own a food court (Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, MySpace…) but not good if you’re a boutique (everyone else.)

Still, the food courts – the portals – had to compete with each other. To do that, they needed content from the boutiques, which the boutiques were eager to provide in return for desperately needed traffic, especially in lieu of cash. Since nobody did exclusive deals with anybody, a standard was needed to make sure the content from boutiques A, B and C could make its way easily onto the portals run by food court landlords 1, 2 and 3.

RSS emerged as that standard, and thus began the RSS revolution. Content – stories, video, blog entries and the rest – increasingly became available outside the Context – the boutique, in our analogy, in which it originated.

Which brings us to today.

“You want the stuff? Yea, we got the stuff. Take your best shot, boy.”

I typed in “Sinatra,” and there, painted before me within milliseconds, was a list of sites related the Chairman of the Board. Even more amazing, the best ones seemed to be towards the top. I clicked around, suppressed a yelp, then returned almost in disbelief. I tried “Star Trek,” then “Ogilvy,” and finally “Troiano,” each time uncovering the fruitful bounty of the Web, each time amazed – literally, amazed – by a technology that seemed able to look inside my head, inside my soul, almost, and give me what I wanted.

The memory is still vivid for me, as is a certain nostalgia for the early days of the net, when we were all just tooling around on our Netscape browsers and Panix e-mail addresses, trying to figure it all out and explain what we’d learned to the dinosaurs who still cared about TV.

<Sigh.>

All of which is why it pains me to face the truth of 2008, which is that Google sucks. And I’m not talking about the company, or the business here. To be honest I think the accusations of evil-doing at The Goog are 1 part factual and 4 parts envy, and as for Google’s actual business, well, to quote a great film of an even earlier age, “We’re not worthy.”

No, I’m talking about google.com. About Search. About the very foundation of what is expected to be a $10 Billion industry next year, about what may be the most powerful franchise on the planet.

Why doth Google suck? Let me count the ways.

Google.com doesn’t know or care about me.

How many times have you used the Google search engine? Hundreds? Thousands? Me too. Assuming your thousands of searches are materially different than mine, why does Google give us the same answer if your next search happens to be the same as mine? Isn’t there ANYTHING they might have gleaned from their multi-year relationship with each of us, from all the time they’ve spent in intimate association with both of us since the 20th century?

The answer, of course is yes. But they don’t. They treat both of us the same, despite the fact that I’m a hyperactive Type-A male with a sci-fi obsession and food issues, and you may be a Type-B female with a celebrity jones and a shoe fetish. When we type “star” into Google, we both get the stock chart of Starent Networks first.

Odds are neither of us is particularly interested in the share price of Starent Networks ($15.30 as I write this, in case you are.) But that might not be true if, say, we arrived at Google just having examined a series of financial planning sites. Which brings us to our next issue…

Google.com doesn’t care or know about where I am.

Google lacks context. Its prioritization algorithm is for the most part absolute, meaning it can’t respond to information about where you’ve just been, or infer where you may be interested in going next. And why is that?

Google.com is ignorant of meaning.

Google is powered by machines that troll the net for character strings, not words per se, in the way we use them. It is used most often by people interested in information, concepts, or even ideas, as opposed to the unique collection and sequence of letters that form “STUPID.” See a problem?

Now, what made Google so great in the beginning was its clever way around this problem, essentially to conduct a non-stop popularity contest where it learns what people want based on the string of letters they enter. If most of the people who search “STUPID” tend to click on a page, uh, “lacking intellectual rigor,” then so be it. That link rises to the top of the query when others input the same word. A system like that only gets better the more people use it, which is what makes Google appear so unassailable.

But meaning matters, and Google’s clever algorithmic workaround has its limits, bringing us to our next issue.

Google.com is take it or leave it.

The simplicity I once marveled at has become a limitation. I give it the string of letters, it gives me the list on the left and the ads on the right. Period.

You no like? Keep scrolling, boy.

How about some dialog, Oh Great Google? A slider? A dropdown maybe? Can I get a RADIO BUTTON, for god’s sake?

No. Google seems to be saying that it knows what we really want better than we do, and that it’s not particularly interested in further clarification from us if it’s wrong, thankyouverymuchandgooddaysir.

And if all that isn’t enough to convince you the Google hegemony has it’s limitations, then think about this…

Google.com doesn’t work on the things we want more of online.

All of the above applies to its limitations in the cataloging and prioritization of textual information. For the streaming video, music files, flash thingys and AJAX widgets that comprise a larger and larger share of our online media consumption, Google.com isn’t even in the game.

The illuminating insult-du-jour at my company is “Pagethinker.” A pagethinker is someone who hasn’t made the leap from thinking about user interfaces as pages of HTML delivered by single servers to the rich, responsive, interactive interfaces often embedded in browser experiences dynamically assembled from servers scattered across the globe. Think one way and you get PowerPoint.

Think another, and SlideRocket comes into being, with all the rich, networked features the under-30 crowd expects from an online application. (This is why Microsoft is even more screwed than Google, but I digress.)

Google.com is a pagethinker, in the sense that it is largely ignorant of information that is not textual, not embedded in the quaint HTML, which brought forth the Web in the days when Forrest Gump ruled the box office. And in the long run, they may be damned by it.

So who can do better?

What’s that? Only if someone else can do better, you say? Fair point, fellow capitalist.

A recent Time magazine article pointed to Facebook (“Is Facebook the Future of Search?”) as emblematic of the social networks better able to handle the “serendipitous nature of search.” Active social networkers increasingly harvest answers to their questions from among large groups of people whose opinions they trust. Twitter is another great example of this, as are the hundreds of social networking sites oriented to the discovery of new music, video, movies, books, etc.

Mahalo is interesting, for what it calls “human powered search.” So is Powerset, though it’s currently focused on indexing concepts embedded in Wikipedia rather than crawling the Web on it’s own.

Experiments in semantic inference (trying to understand words as words in the way people use them) include Nova Spivack’s Twine, “a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people,” and Freebase, an “open database of the world’s information built by the community and for the community,” at least according to the people that force you to register to use it.

The truth is that today, none of these services can match Google’s universality and broad utility. But the odds are higher now than in the recent past that one of them will match Google one day.  Or, at the very least, that more and more people will pause before defaulting to Google.com every time they need something online.

What’s it mean for advertisers?

Well, the good news for advertisers is that Google may come down a peg or two as their hegemony is threatened, that they might start treating advertisers more like clients and less like an administrative nuisance. That would be good. And while it’s unlikely their pricing power will erode (clicks from good prospects will always be worth a lot), it is very likely that the innovation of people trying to knock them off the top of the mountain will spur them to deliver technologies and approaches that increase the relevancy of search output, the click-through of search advertising, and the positive pre-disposition of the prospects they deliver. All good news.

The bad news? Well, that’s only for those of you very interested in the first result you get when you search “GOOG.”

From the book’s Web site:

Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?

Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?…

By the end of this book, you’ll know the answers to these and many other questions that have implications for your personal life, for your business life, and for the way you look at the world.”

The book is well written and insightful, but reading it I couldn’t help but think over and over again that it was really a book about branding written by a mathematician who – working deep below the earth in an undisclosed location insulated from brands of any kind – had somehow uncovered the existence of brands through an elaborate mathematical proof.

If you replaced every instance of the word “irrational” in this book with the word “emotional,” it would lose 80% of the revelatory irony that forms its spine, to the point of making observation after observation which would seem plainly obvious to your average small agency Account Coordinator.

“People love free, even when they’re not getting much!” Thanks, Bernbach. Duh.
The question worth pondering here, at least from a marketing perspective, is why even really smart people still don’t get the brand thing. Why is it so hard to grok the concept of assigning emotional value to something, beyond whatever rational utility one derives from it? And is doing so really “irrational,” or is it just a function of the fact that, for better or worse, we are all emotional beings?

Few people can produce a coherent definition of the word “brand” on demand. Try it yourself … next time someone uses the word “brand,” ask them to define what it means. I did this today, and here’s what I got:

“A brand? Are you kidding? Well, it’s a kind of a trademark, like, or a logo. Well, not actually. It’s more like a, well, er, a product, like. Or the name of a product. Something like that. You know what a brand is!”

The same is of course true of many words, like jocund, and evanescent, and agoraphobia. Yet unlike those words which rarely come up in business conversation (unless you’re a happy physicist locked in a room someplace) people use the word “brand” all the time. I hear it constantly from people who obviously don’t know what it means, which frankly drives me pazzo.

So what’s a brand, you ask? Well, I think of a brand as a collective emotional response.

First and foremost, a brand is a response. It is not something you dictate, not something that becomes real by virtue of your 12 gig slide deck. It is something inside “them,” out there, separate from whatever it is you spend your time trying to sell. This seems like a subtle distinction, but it is in fact profound.

In my experience, the best communicators maintain what is sometimes called a “listener based model of success.” That is, they focus neither on communicating in such a way as to confer the most praise upon themselves (tragically common,) nor on the intrinsic quality of their particular method of communication (the clear speaking voice, the iron-clad logic, the eloquent prose…) Instead, they try to understand what the listener thinks/feels/does before, and what they want the listener to think/feel/do after. They focus on saying whatever needs to be said however it needs to be said, in order to effect exactly that change in knowledge, perception or action. This is a very good discipline, and I strongly encourage it for people at every level of an organization.

In the context of branding, marketers are often guilty of subscribing to one of the first two success models. In the first case, a brand becomes an avatar of its brand manager. Like children burdened with their parent’s disappointments in life, these brands are most often much “cooler” than they need to be to deliver the business result.

In the second case, just the reverse is true. Marketers obsessed with intrinsic quality create communication that reflects great skill and no talent, brilliant advertising that nobody really sees, artful design for its own self-indulgent sake.

So what kind of response are we talking about here? A collective, emotional response.

Building a brand is the process of adding emotional value to your product. A lot of people think this is ad guy hooey, but it’s as real as Coca-Cola’s market cap. Is sugar water in a red and white can really worth more than 99.9% similar sugar water in a black and white can? Whatever you think, the market decides. And every day the market says, “yes.”

If people are rational, you have to ask why. It’s either the brainwashing of repetition (nonsense), or people are actually getting something more from that red and white can.

I worked on the Taco Bell brand back in the day, and we used to say 69 cents was a good deal for a taco, but it was a great deal for a taco and the feeling that you’re not like everybody else. That’s what a brand is, and that’s why people invest billions to create them. Is that irrational? Sorry, but I don’t think so.

Collective just means that a brand requires n people to deliver this emotional response, where n > 1. It’s also meant to imply that brands are built one person at a time, something which has become truer as media has become more fragmented.
So is anything that elicits a collective emotional response a brand? No. Brands are defined by intent; they create emotional value as a means to an end, rather than as an end unto itself (we call something whose primary intention is to elicit an emotional response for its own sake “art.”)

People are, in fact, “predictably emotional.” While that assertion may not sell books like it’s more ironic and provocative cousin, it’s a more actionable insight for people who are just trying to sell a little more soap.

So what is Twitter? Well, you basically create an account, and use it to send little updates (“tweets”) online as you go through your day:

“Long morning, feel like crap, hydrating.”
“Getting hungry, sushi maybe???”
“Fight with Joan last night, I’m a putz.”

Wow. Exciting.

So what accounts for the service’s geometric growth? Why are the digerati so enamored with Twitter, to the point that NOT being there is like missing out on a conversation with the cool kids? And finally, what’s the lesson for marketers in the phenomenon that Twitter has become?

Three pillars underlie Twitter’s undeniable success. First off, it’s blogging for lazy, time-starved, or ADD-afflicted people. In other words, most of us. Where a blog post requires a point, prose, and a few links, a tweet merely requires a thought. If you can just react honestly to the world as it comes to you, you can tweet with the best of them.

And therein lies the second pillar, that there is something utterly fascinating about peeking in on the mundane details and random thoughts that occur in the lives of other people. CommonCraft describes the value of this exchange in a Twitter introductory video, though it focuses a bit too much on your current friends and acquaintances.

While not a friend of mine (yet, anyway) Geek Guru Guy Kawasaki is a habitual Twitterer. Guy recently noted that despite Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s assertion that he (Steve) responds promptly to e-mail, Guy hasn’t yet received a response to the 2 notes he sent Steve after Mix08. For reasons even I can’t understand, this kind of inside baseball is oddly intriguing.

Jim Long is another Twitterati, posting in the system as NewMediaJim. While chasing stories for NBC News, Long mixes tantalizing live tweets from Air Force One with pithy little transcendent insights (“the Brumidi Corridor in the US Capitol is simply stunning.) Another is Laura Fitton, the quasi-mythic Pistachio; making friends by collecting the wisdom of the community (“We’re a team. What’d you learn at SXSW? Who’d you meet? What sessions are worth listening to?”) and just by being so darn… real  (“Strange feeling to see my future ex-husband’s face pop up on Snitter…”)

Which brings me to the third driver of the Twitter phenomenon, perhaps the least apparent but most important for marketers.

Twitter is a look beyond someone’s public face, below the more charming and polished persona they present to the world, behind the carefully crafted communication we all use to seem smarter than we are when we let our guard down. While its detractors see a stream of mundane, tedious details, its fans sense something profoundly real and fundamentally human in the quiet musings of both extraordinary events and everyday life.

Twitter fascinates us because it provides a window on the authentic. You can “fake” a blog post, whether you rip off an idea or spend 10 minutes to get a sentence just right. But your tweets are the real you. There aren’t enough characters to support frivolity, and there’s not enough time to pass ideas through the filter of who-we-want-to-be. It’s just you at that moment in time, like letting the world inside your head for just a split second.

So what’s it all mean for marketers? Tactically speaking, Twitter will almost undoubtedly leverage its vast network of impressions through some kind of ad placement eventually, though it has not yet done so. Some third-party “client software” built for Twitter (including Snitter, Spaz, Tweetr and my personal favorite Twitterific) support advertising, though the targeting value of the text that flows through Twitter is questionable.

The Twitter service itself will probably prove to be a poor advertising medium for the vast majority of products. It can, however, be a potent tool for promoting anything that’s sold face-to-face, rather than bought off-the-shelf. That kind of selling is about building relationships, and you can get to know someone very quickly just by following them around in their daily life for a few days.

Stepping back, Twitter casts some light on all social media by revealing that people don’t want pedestrian online dialog for its own sake. These exchanges are instead a means to ends about which many people care a great deal: Understanding, Validation, and Authenticity.

The Twitterati hates anything that smacks of corporate polish, marketing doublespeak, or artificial anything. They like their news from real people, their video from other users, and their music from local bands. They eat more organic produce, watch more reality television and see more independent films than the generations that preceded them. Even their porn looks homemade (or so I’m told). It’s no coincidence that all of those things are gaining share at the same time Twitter and its multi-media spawn (Pownce, Utterz, Transpera, Qik, Mogulus, Seesmic, etc. etc. etc.) are taking over the world.

Strategically speaking, what this means for brands is that real rules. The Columbia ads featuring a sadomasochistic Gert Boyle and her intrepid son are sheer genius in this light, along with the subservient chicken, and even Kia’s “Duh” campaign. A real Frank Purdue still works, a fake Orville Redenbacher did not.

So why should you be on Twitter? Well, to get into the right headspace to do real work that speaks authentically to people, you have to walk the walk. For the people behind the ads – clients, marketing execs, CDs and writers, you and me – it’s time to get real as well. It’s time to come to terms with the fact that we cannot and should not keep our “Work” and “Home” lives in separate boxes. There’s one you – just like everybody else – and in the end making the leap of faith required to expose that real, flawed, whole person is the key to understanding not only social networking, but the spiraling number of people who participate in it every day.

So slap that Obama logo up on Facebook, post Thursday’s party picks on Flickr, and blog your heart out about the fact that that last copy strategy was wrong, wrong, wrong. When you’re ready to share what’s really going on inside your head with the rest of us, join me at http://twitter.com/miketrap.

The good news is that it turns out consumers will pay for it! Woo-hooo!

The bad news is that they won’t pay money, just attention.

The media sages and digerati are all a-Twitter with commentary on the economic, social, and technical implications of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo!, but for those of us in the extended digital ad space, the primary implication couldn’t be more clear: In the share battle among the big three online revenue models – Purchase, Subscription, and Advertising – the advertising model is winning.

Microsoft has accepted – embraced even – what some in the newspaper, magazine, video, music, and software businesses are trying hard to ignore:

Given the choice between paying for something and getting it for free, people prefer free.

Given the above, you either need to a.) make sure your product isn’t available for free, or b.) find an economic model that doesn’t depend on people paying for it. If you choose b.), advertising is something you probably need to explore, understand and master, pronto.

Since it’s hard to argue whether the above is true, we seem intent on arguing whether or not it’s good. Advocates for “liberating” intellectual property of all kinds celebrate the “democratization” of art and commerce online, while detractors point to squandering a whole generation of people with genuine talent and insight who are now unable to make a living in the application of those gifts for the greater good of society.

If you run a software business (in the broadest sense of both terms), this argument is interesting, but largely irrelevant. You can either sit in the corner of your closet and try to go to your happy place – like the music industry has collectively chosen to do – or you can set to work re-shaping your business to the new reality. Love them or hate them, you have to give Mr. Ballmer and company credit for spotting the shovel on its way to their collective face, and for being willing to pour the fruits of their current franchise into an attempt to duck.

With Google hard at work on “free” (a.k.a., “ad supported”) online versions of the Office apps that account for a substantial share of Microsoft’s profits, how could Microsoft not allocate some substantial share of their accumulated treasure to the development of assets and expertise in the online advertising space? Among such assets Yahoo! is like a crown jewel at a yard sale, a little dusty from lack of skilled attention, but no less precious and now a relative bargain.

Setting aside the question of whether this acquisition is a good thing for John Q. Consumer, it certainly seems to be a positive development for the ad business.

First, it aligns two of the stronger players attempting to stave off an emerging Google hegemony, who as anyone who’s dealt with the advertising services team at Google can tell you, could benefit from some humility. 

Second, it means a large group of very smart grownups trying to make online advertising more valuable, if only so they can charge more for it. Advertisers have long been willing to pay twice the price for something that reliably delivers twice the result, and in this arithmetic is the foundation of an online ad business that delivers both superior results to its clients and superior returns to its shareholders.

Finally, to the extent that Google and Micro-HOO! are blazing the trail for ad-supported online applications and services, building the infrastructure to support that industry and educating the market as to its possibilities, it’s likely others will be able to draft on their success. The result could be a whole new generation of digital outlets, and an even broader buffet of highly targeted media.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the last Internet Bubble everybodyandthiermother.com talked about the ad model they’d use to “monetize eyeballs” when the money from their $100 million series B venture round ran low. Turns out that was harder than it seemed, and in the end we ended up with a lot of Ferrari’s on eBay and power concentrated in the hands of four or five online ad giants.

Still, things are different now. Broadband access is commonplace, and online’s share of total ad spend has reached critical mass well below its share of users’ media consumption. Most agencies understand the potential of the medium, and CMO’s are arguing about the right way to measure results instead of whether or not they can be achieved.

If the number of online ad giants is now to decline by one, but the competitive balance among those that remain is improved, it’s probably a net positive from the narrow perspective of the online ad business. In the short run, leverage with Google will increase and in the long run, advertisers will have more good options on the table.

Users will get more of the things they want online for “free,” at least in terms of cold hard cash. What the cost to them will be in terms of attention, choice and privacy, it’s much harder to say.

No matter what your politics, these are interesting times in the realm of political marketing. After a decade-long footrace between the parties to out-execute each other in the realm of “microtargeting,” the technique is being painted as the root of all evil by progressives bent on putting the “United” back into the good ‘ol USA.

Tabling for a moment whether this shift is motivated by aspiration or resignation on the part of the Democrats, the strategy itself merits some reflection by commercial marketers.

Most brand managers can certainly relate to the battle to build a better database than their competitors, to glean more insight from that data, and act more nimbly upon it. Prevailing wisdom – at least among advertising’s digerati – is that such is the march of progress. Frank Parrish, the brilliant but short-lived Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Direct said way back in 1995 that “the future of advertising is direct, and the future of direct is digital.”

Not long after, the political parties came to embrace the techniques to which Mr. Parrish was referring, led by a Texas direct mail impresario named Karl Rove. As the Los Angeles Times put it on Mr. Rove’s departure from the White House in 2007:

“Rove’s system had three major components. Using powerful computer systems, modern marketing tools, micro-targeting of supporters and sophisticated get-out-the-vote techniques, he revolutionized the nuts and bolts of campaigning…”

Republicans held no monopoly on such techniques, of course, but they appear to have out-executed the Democrats in locating pockets of red voters in blue precincts, and on messaging those voters on carefully framed issues designed to inspire impassioned support. Mr. Rove himself talked of the “permanent republican majority” such tactics might support, and, up until the last mid-term election, appeared well on track toward achieving his goal.

But just as basketball, running, and tennis shoes begat the Cross Trainer, a re-formation may be underway in American politics. Led by Mr. Obama, a backlash to the relentless segmentation of American voters may be – forgive me – afoot.

In Mr. Obama’s words:

“…there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States… But I’ve got news for them, too…. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Sure, individual sites remember me from time to time, but the Web as a whole is constantly asking the same questions, starting from zero with every new site, making me give the same answers, time after time.

From the cross-site perspective of an individual user, the Internet is like a friend who forgets us from one minute to the next.

Swimming a little deeper… Five significant problems have bubbled up as more people take advantage of more online services: Profiles, Passwords, PIM, Personalization and Privacy.

Profiles: “Nemo? That’s a nice name…”

First up are profiles. Like most people, I am sick to death of entering my last name, address, preferred credit card and all the rest in site after site online. Yea, yea, I know, there are more than a few systems to manage the mundane but intimate details that comprise my digital identity. But honestly? I’m too busy to figure them out. The ones I can understand are from providers I don’t trust, and the providers I can trust just don’t seem to understand.

OpenID you say? OK, and you can explain to my Dad he can log in to e*trade with a url. Windows Cardspace perhaps? Sure…From the good folks who brought you Passport, BOB, and WebTV before spending $6 Billion to become an ad network.

Great software seems made by people smarter than me for people dumber than me, and nothing I’ve seen meets that standard. Without that, I’m stuck in a discontinuity: Even if a few of these identity management systems are better than entering my vitals again and again, none is as easy as filling in the form one more time. And the beat goes on.

Passwords: “Yes, trust. It’s what friends do.”

The related problem is, of course, remembering your passwords. I now have 120 unique online passwords to manage, which is utterly out of control.
The systems to manage this are a little better, including a few decent Firefox browser add-ons and tools like Sxipper. Still, there’s no way to sync either of those across browsers, and no smart way to export and transfer that data short of a metal briefcase and handcuffs.

I’m convinced most people just use the same password everywhere, despite being aware it’s foolish to do so. Others have 2 or 3 in heavy rotation, use a variant on the site name, etc., which means it doesn’t exactly take a Navajo codebreaker to compromise someone’s identity in potentially damaging and dramatic fashion.

PIM: “P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney. P. Sherman…”

PIM is next, meaning personal information management. It’s become increasingly clear that there’s a core set of information – my calendar, address book/social network, birthdays, notes etc. – that I need direct access to in multiple locations.

The options here are comparatively good. I can store all of it in iGoogle, MyYahoo!, .Mac or Plaxo, and access it from anywhere. But, each of those systems is binary with respect to sharing with other sites. I either provide my password and they get it all whenever they like, or I don’t and I’m out of luck. The result is that, once again, I need to refer to Outlook/Entourage when I want to forward something to somebody online just this once, which dramatically reduces my willingness to do so.

First, some perspective. The main reason Madison Avenue is so interested in Facebook’s new ad targeting scheme is that it’s both revolutionary and reassuringly familiar. When you boil it down, Facebook is enabling advertisers to focus on individuals again, instead of just their online behavior. In a way, it brings us back to a gentler time of afternoon cocktails and Mad Men, when media planners focused on reach and frequency among a universally agreed upon set of demographic segments. Ahhh, the salad days. If you were Acme Car Wax, you ran a full page bleed in Popular Mechanics because you knew that suburban male teens tended to be dis-proportionally interested in your product.   

Cable made life more complicated, and when the banner ad was born, all it really did was digitize The System – without adding much value. Not only was the reach on that early inventory unsatisfying, the targeting was pretty bland given both the homogeneity of online early adopters, and the practical challenge of gathering good demographic segment data from anonymous web site traffic. It was Google who brought something fresh and spicy to the table, creating an ad medium designed and built from scratch for a new, interactive medium. Now Acme Car Wax could target its message to people looking for “car wax,” without worrying too much about who those people were. “Search Ads” crushed “Display Ads” online; AdWords ate Yahoo’s lunch and never looked back.  

Today’s “Behavioral Targeting” takes things to the next level, looking at behavior across web sites and trying to infer purchase intent based on the data stream. BT will have a learning curve, but it makes perfect sense to media buyers weaned on Google, who by now care more about what you want than who you are.  Which brings us to today. Facebook’s ad approach is something very different from search advertising and BT, and in some ways brings online advertising full circle. Now you can target the person again, instead of (or in addition to) the behavior. As advertisers come to understand this, the likelihood it will catch fire is quite high.  

Unless, that is, the people about whom all this data is being collected decide to clear the table. Conventional wisdom is that people under 35 don’t care much about privacy, though it’s never been clear whether that’s a generational or a life-stage phenomenon. To the extent that they aren’t concerned, it’s probably because they don’t think about what’s behind it too much. Kind of like a hot dog. So what’s an emergent ad medium to do? Well, you can either put a warning label on your hot dog, which is what the BT guys have done with “Do Not Track;” or you can put a Weinermobile on Main Street and ask users to join the parade, which is what Facebook is doing with SocialAds.

The long run winner of this bake-off, to the extent that there is one, will need to balance the need to give advertisers the information they want, with the need to give users control of the information they want to protect. The key may be empowering users to tell just enough about what they want so publishers can serve it to them, and just enough about who they are so advertisers will pick up the check.