The Ramblings of a Fosgnilbmareht

Another post from Clear Night Sky:

Steve Nelson recently sent me, and a few other people here at Clear Ink, an article from the New York Times. It tells about a new approach being tested to measure a marketing campaign’s effectiveness. The company, IMMI, is providing cell phone service for it’s test audience, and in return, the audience doesn’t have to do anything. Well almost nothing - they are asked to carry the cell phone around like normal, as it replaces their existing phone. IMMI monitors what these cell phones can hear throughout the day and then match it with whatever marketing they are measuring. They say it isn’t listening to your conversation, only the media around you. Very Big Brother-ish if you ask me, but how do you know that your *current* cell phone isn’t already doing this already?

And with GPS apps like Google Maps, it even knows where you are and where you have been. Of course, most cell phones have built in GPS anyway so you don’t even need to have the app installed to be tracked. Granted some of this is pretty cool when used right, but where do we draw the line between usefulness and having the CIA know our every action, word and location?

I posted this awhile back on Clear Night Sky and I liked it so I thought I would repost it here:

Yahoo! just released a beta 3.0 of its Yahoo! Go mobile service. Version 2.0 gave you mobile access to your Yahoo email, calendar, contacts, news, maps, traffic and more. While 2.0 was ok (would have been great if I could use my slide out keyboard on my phone), 3.0 looks simply amazing. I am truly excited about 3.0. It’s doing what Facebook Apps did for Facebook, but on something I use constantly, my cell phone.

My normal cellphone of choice is a Windows Mobile device so I am used to having real applications on my phone that are fully functional just like on my computer. But Yahoo! Go 3.0 will let me write apps for it in a simple-ish language and have the added benefit of being able to use it on my other cell phone line (don’t ask, it’s cheaper for me to have 2 cell phones and service then 1 so I go with it), or any cell phone that can support Go. There are so many uses that someone could come up with for this, but me, I am looking forward to finally being able to write a ledger for my accounts so I can track my spending. Call me new school but I never carry a checkbook around, or even a pen for that matter, so being able to enter this on my phone and have it update online would be really useful to me. It’ll be interesting to see what others develop for it.

In the title I called Yahoo! mobile crazy cool and the last paragraph gave just a hint of how cool it could be, well now just a taste of how scary it can be. While not supported yet, Phase two of Yahoo!’s launch will try to make use of some of the phone’s built-in features like location based services. This means the application will be able to locate where you are physically and update the service with that information so you can get usual facts like nearby restaurants. This sounds cool to, but combine it with the tracking and stats they plan to implement soon and then anyone, not just the CIA, will be able to track where you go. They can also track how long you stayed somewhere, what people you were close to (if they also have the program installed) and where they went. Of course, the thing that makes me feel better about this is that it *should* only work if you have the app running.

Overall, I am excited about this news but slightly worried. I may be a lot more worried when they roll out phase 2 but for now, I am going to go write a checkbook widget.

Read more about this at Yahoo! Mobile