PageFlakes Low Pageviews & Out Of Gas (cash)

Personalized web page startup Pageflakes is running out of cash and is desperately seeking a buyer reports Gigaom. Pageflakes aggregates RSS feeds and widgets in a customizable AJAX-based personal web page.

Pageflakes has around 1.5 million visitors a month and over 200,000 registered users. However that pales in comparison to their closest pure competitor Netvibes. However, the real competitors are Google's iGoogle, Yahoo's 360, Microsoft and AOL which too offer personalized web pages. The cost of these services is borne by their core offerings.

However, Pageflakes's personalized page is their core offering and it is much harder to monetize. Further to garner premium ad dollars the site needs serious traffic, which costs money. Again the majors can acquire traffic simply by putting up a "tab" to their personalized web page offerings.

According to Gigaom Pageflakes is just the tip of the iceberg and many 2005-2006 consumer web startups that rely of on VCs money will find life increasingly tough once the money stops flowing (See Crash 2.0 Coming). At least Pageflakes has interested buyers, even if they are not big spenders.

Search Engines Must Delete Data Within Six Months

A European Commission advisory body on data protection has said that search engines should delete data held about their users within six months reports the BBC.

The proposed rule specifieds that "Search engine providers must delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose they were collected for."

Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months and MSN does the same after 13 months. The body said search companies were not "clear enough" on their data protection policy and the recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could possibly lead to a clash with search companies. The recommendation could have broader implications such as getting user consent before serving them personalized advertisements.

Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, said in a statement: "Google takes privacy incredibly seriously; protecting our users' privacy is at the heart of all our products. It is the reason we were the first company to commit to anonymising our search logs, and also why we dramatically shortened our preference cookie lifetime."

Search engines presently collect and store information every search query such as search term, IP address, browser type, time, and number of clicks. The search engines say this information it required to better serve the user. The advisory body said search engine providers had "insufficiently explained" why they were storing and processing personal data to their users and that personal data of users should not be stored or processed "beyond providing search results". The report also said search engines did not need to gather additional personal data, beyond the IP address of a machine being used, in order to deliver basic search results and advertisements.

The advisory body said, "Search engine providers mention many different purposes for the processing, it is not clear to what extent data are reprocessed for another purpose that is incompatible with the purpose for which they were originally collected". Thus search engines should not use personally identifiable data to improve their services or for accountancy purposes. Nor should personal data stored for security purposes be used to improve services and if search engines enriched personal data about users from third parties they could be breaking the law unless customers had given explicit consent. It said users should have the right to access, inspect and correct all the personal data about themselves held by search engines, including their profiles and search history.

The report issued a set of obligations to search engines firms, including:

• Search engines should get informed consent from users if they correlate personal data across different services, such as desktop search
• Search engine providers must delete or anonymise (in an irreversible and efficient way) personal data once they are no longer necessary for the purpose for which they were collected
• Personal data should not be held by search engines for longer than six months
• In case search engine providers retain personal data longer than six months, they must demonstrate comprehensively that it is strictly necessary for the service
• It is not necessary to collect additional personal data from individual users in order to be able to perform the service of delivering search results and advertisements
• If search engine providers use cookies, their lifetime should be no longer than demonstrably necessary
• Search engine providers must give users clear and intelligible information about their identity and location and about the data they intend to collect store or transmit, as well as the purpose for which they are collected

Netvibes Ginger Beta Announced

I recently met Tariq Krim, Netvibes Founder and CEO. The company has just come out with the next gen of their personalized homepage Netvibes Ginger. This is a private beta release of the service; general availability for all users is expected in mid-Feb.

As described on the site, with the beta, users can "create and personalize a netvibes Universe page just for yourself or publish one for your friends, family, everyone! A Universe is your very own personal dashboard that's updated live directly from all your favorite Web services (email, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, widgets) and media content (blogs, podcasts, video). Everything you enjoy on the Web, available at a glance, all in one place — spend less time surfing and logging in from site to site and more time enjoying your web, your way."

Google Launches Themes API for iGoogle

Upping the ante on personalization, Google is now allowing users to customize and personalize their iGoogle homepage even further. The company yesterday announced the release of the iGoogle Themes API along with a themes directory. The Themes API allows users to either create their own new theme or select from a user-generated one. Users can create a theme and share it with the tens of millions of iGoogle users around the world.

Facebook: Stop Invading My Privacy

Online activist, MoveOn.org, has launched a campaign against Facebook citing the social networking site has violated the privacy of its users by making their transactions public. Facebook is accused of using web beacons to make users' purchase information available on partner sites via their friends' News Feeds which means that others can see your purchases from online retailers, movie rentals, etc. MoveOn has setup an online petition for people to sign and a Facebook group, Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!, for users to show their displeasure with this practice.
Users are apparently able to opt out on Facebook but it is neither easy to do nor easy to see per MoveOn.

The problem with web beacons is that by nature they are hidden...hidden in the page code (usually a 1x1 pixel gif with an associated cookie) and many companies fail to disclose their use of them in their privacy statements which begs the question of informed consent. But beacons are not all bad. They can be used to track user behavior on a web site and record and provide information such as IP addresses, browser being used, pages visited, number of unique visitors, and web usage patterns. The information gathered can be used for good or evil. They can be used to better serve the needs of site users with more relevant and personalized content and improved user experiences. They are also used by third party ad agencies to track the effectiveness of ad campaigns. Or, they can be used to blow surprise gift purchases for its users like on Facebook.

Personalized Search & Privacy

Google is using YouTube to post videos that explain how, when, and why they collect information about searches, and how you can protect your privacy while using our search engine.

In the first video, you can learn about some of the information collected eg. IP addresses, cookies, and search queries and how they this information is used to improve your search experience as well as prevent against fraud and other abuses.

Google's search algorithms are designed to take your personal preferences into account, including the things you search for and the sites you visit. They provided the example about the Louvre in Paris. You are more likely to get results about the French capital than about Paris Hilton.

In the second video the are offering a closer look at personalization and the privacy tools available when you choose to personalize your search. Personalization has been an area that raises concerns about privacy, and Google wants you to understand how they personalize search results while protecting your privacy with tools such as “pause” and “remove” buttons designed to help put you in control of personalization.

Google Gadget Ventures Announced at Searchnomics

Google's Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience, officially announced yesterday at the Searchnomics 2007 Conference the launch of Google Gadget Ventures. Members of the press including ABC7 News were on hand to get the breaking news scoop. Marissa introduced the program during her closing Keynote address. If you are familiar with the personalized Google homepage, iGoogle, where users can add widgets/gadgets created by others or better yet create your own personalized gadgets, then this program is a spinoff of this. If your Google gadget generates a quarter of a million page views weekly, you are eligible for a $5K grant to build it out further and once you have received the grant you can then apply for an additional $100K seed capital to build a business around the Google gadgets platform. A program such as this facilitates among other things innovation and from a business perspective, even more reasons to stay on the Google site. For more information, see the Official Google Blog post on this program. (See as well my previous blog post on iGoogle.)