The Immortal Cookie. Do Not Want.

There's a new type of HTTP cookie that exploits an HTML5 hack. The long and short of it is that the cookie becomes immortal. The cookie is capable of leaping across browsers on your computer. It re-instates itself after a user has deleted it.

It's not right. And analysts should reject it.

I've long been dissatisfied with the concept of 'unique visitor', by and large because it's a highly unstable proxy measure for a person. People go into private browsing during key points in their day, anti-virus programs tend to root out these 'tracking cookies' as malware. and owing to an unfortunate three fiddy event in 2000 - people of a certain demography routinely clear their cookies. A commenter on Hacker News appeared to justify the use of these hacked cookies, arguing that you couldn't assume that people really wanted to delete their cookies.

I disagree. Clearly, the cookie retention curve is decaying because more and more people want to delete them. They may not understand what the cookies actually are. But they still want to delete them - possibly because they don't understand them.

Some SEO, SEM, and affiliate folks are very excited about these cookies. They are often compensated on 30 to 90 day cookies - where a person exposed to something they did actually buys something further down the line., A leftward shifting cookie retention curve damages their compensation model. They're clearly incented to use these immortal cookies.

So are web analysts for that matter. The Unique Visitor metric, the closest proxy for the old-world media term 'REACH', has been difficult to work with. It's instability is very difficult to explain, quickly, to an impatient audience. It's non-additive. It's very nature, and how it's complicated by time scale, results in all sorts of additional error. Using immortal cookies would suddenly make the first problem disappear. It could make conversion rates, if they use unique visitors as the denominator, appear to go up.

The power to delete cookies must reside squarely in the hands of the individual. This isn't only the right thing to do, it also keeps your practice out of the mud, and out of the court room.

Whereas it is my belief that society and individuals have disproportionately benefited from the invention and use of cookies, the right to delete them must reside in the hands of the user. Face it, it's how you'd want to be treated.

Consolidation - More to Come

IBM has announced its acquisition of Netezza, a datawarehousing and BI company, for $1.7 billion.

There's much more to come.

A majority of the human beings are generating machine readable data about themselves. Just check out the mobile penetration numbers and see for yourself. Even in developing countries they're generating huge trails of data. And while there wont' be 50 billion phones on the planet, every human being will have access to a mobile phone very soon.

More advanced devices and experiences will generate ever more data.

A majority of human beings in the developed world are generating more machine readable data than ever before. Whereas the Internet has always been social, the relative transaction cost has now come down and blends with a mobile device very nicely. You can use an idle 30 seconds to literally tell the world, in 60 characters, how great your baked potato was.

The sheer amount of data mandates technology that can handle and process big data. Big people are already asking very big questions. Big questions require big data.

Big data is to the 21rst as railroads were to the 19th.

And, comparatively, it's only 1840.

There's much more to come.

If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer.

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold."

-Andrew Lewis, August 26, 2010.

Andrew's statement is accurate.

It's well worth considering.

Ponies and Bears and Newsfeeds and Facebook.com

Hamel's counterpoint to my previous post on the Facebook LIKE button is up.

Check out both posts for detail.

If you want the Cole Notes:

Chris: "It's not all spam. But it can be spam. And some marketers will spam. Some marketers will provide utility. There will be a net positive over time - like email."

Dave: "It's all spam. You clicking the Like button generates NewsFeed spam. Screw your interests, Chris. Because I don't care if you Like something."

Fair enough Dave. I see your point and I understand it.

In general, like people clump alike. I tweet stuff all the time aimed at a very specific focus area. All of it is solid gold and incredibly valuable to the people I'm talking to regularly. A Like, in a Facebook page, is a lot like a tweet with a link, isn't? And typically - I clump with analysts, innovators, technologists and troublemakers on twitter.

And like people generally clump on Facebook - though - it seems a lot less brutal than Twitter. Let me expand.

I remember there was a time on twitter when certain people would constantly retweet Digg articles. And I stopped following those people, because I read Digg myself.

I no longer read Digg. But you get my point.

To me it was spam. Why are these people polluting my feed with Digg? Clearly, I infer, they were trying to share with mainline marketers at the time. And that's fine. But that wasn't me.

On the flip side, sometimes I click on links from people who generally provide good OC (Original Content). And I'm consistently rewarded for clicking on those links. I learned of Dave's post by way of Twitter.

So the UX question is - are clumps well formed enough on Facebook for friendships to survive newsfeed noise? Will Facebook make it easy for me to brutally segment my valuable attention?

Dave's response: I don't care if Chris likes "My Little Pony", is just fine. He likes the Care Bears. I'm into Ponies.

On Twitter, I just unfollow such people if they're too persistent, and at some point, if they're hammering #measure with bullcrap - "optimize your pages for maximum results" - I'll block.

If such behavior is transferred to Facebook, well - friend lists might never be the same.