Is Google Approaching the U-Turn?
John Battelle has a very nice article entitled Thinking About Google and The Turning Point and I can relate. I still remember when Microsoft came out with Passport and what all the rage was. Now we are a lot more quiet and it is getting weird what kind of stuff I happily have on Google. Google tracks my web site (not for long, as it’s not good for a blog, more on that another time), handles my ads, does my eMail, is my search, runs small adwords campaigns for me (did run very big ones at my previous job and will likely again), has my account at Google Answers (and even gave me a blanket for being a researcher from the start :)), a bit of my network in Orkut, tracks me wherever there are AdSense ads, … the list could go on. Remember DoubleClick? When they bought a company that would potentially connect their clickstreams to personal identifiable data, all hell broke loose. HELLLOOOOOOO!!! Google has AdSense, the biggest advertising network ever invented, because it is a sales network and because its integrated effortless and works to a good degree.
Whenever they you see a Google ad, they know what it should be about, what the time of day is, what your country and provider is, what kind of conversion some of the ads have in the ad, what you search for when not surfing around, that you get lots of eMails (they likely don’t “know” what you get as eMail), and lots more stuff. So all in all Google is really approaching a size that makes it sound like the player out there but hey, you can switch. Go somewhere else. Things are hotting up out there and it will only get more interesting.
Technorati Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Clickstream, Google, Doubleclick, Battelle