I don’t think it’s any shock that Google has the data to segment users based on their browsing habits. The shocker to me is that they’re making the result of that segmentation available to webmasters everywhere.

The full text of the email is:

From: Google AdSense
Subject: Introducing interest-based advertising – action required for your AdSense account

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

One thing that has me thinking they’re less than purely evil is that they at least show you what they think you are in your personal ad preferences page, and allow you some options for configuration. However, it would take someone reasonably savvy to locate that page.

I’m interested to see where this goes. I know it’s a big win for businesses that want better ad targeting, but this is clearly a big setback for privacy advocates.

Regardless, I really can’t wait to see the ad profile they assign me… . o O ( Computer nerd, mountain biking, porn addicted, binge drinker )

Here’s some rationale I spewed at my hombres, only to be rejected immediately:

• So that all your other friends know what you’re eating and drinking.
• To benefit your career by showing your potential employers and colleagues your ideas out in the wild.
• “Group-text” everyone to plan festivities.

And really, it makes sense that they shouldn’t be twittering. I don’t want to hear when anyone else is taking a crap, so why would they want me to tell them as much? Why would I give away my next great idea? Most importantly, the majority of my text messages should never be seen in public, for fear that women and children everywhere would begin crying.

Maybe the problem is that I haven’t convinced myself that I should be on Twitter…

I decided to give their facial recognition a try.  After visiting my picasa homepage, I clicked on the link suggesting that I try to identify my photos.  After a few minutes, I was redirected to a page that listed all the “heads” from all my albums and attempted to group them together.  For the most part, it did alright.  There were a few boys/girls mixed as one picasa-person, it thought my mom and sister were the same, and it created about 30 different version of me, each with a few headshots.

All-in-all, I’m pretty impressed.  I still need to go through and name everyone.  Which leads to the inevitable question: should I let Google know what I look like and who I associate with?

• docs: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Python
• api: http://code.google.com/p/pyfacebook/
• tutorial: http://keepnix.com/articles/hellominifb.html

The author at Zen Habits recently talked about wanting someone to develop a “social karma” application. The idea would be that one could do good deeds and get some sort of recognition for it, thus encouraging more do-good-ing. People could advertise for things they needed, others could provide it, and everyone would be in a giant, happy, reciprocal, karmactic ring of love.

Still trying to think of other good uses for social networking apps. There’s a lot of things like that (but not quite), and all tend to be quite annoying after a while.