@ Cookies - Spyware - Mobilisation
In my course "Complete Anatomy of a Wireless Application", I have begun exploring the potential of 3rd party cookies for mobile services. There seems to be a plethora of possibilities.
Cookies get used to store information about your browsing sessions. Information you view, sites you visit, ads you click....all this is potentially trackable with cookies.
One of the most interesting possibilities is using cookies to understand what a user is currently "up to", especially in terms of shopping interests, and then to tie this in with location-sensitive advertising, (not "spamming") and information services.
I am more intrigued by the potential seamlessness of the experience. That we could go out into public spaces and enjoy a continuum of our home broadband environment. Our information grazing habits on the home PC (and work one, possibly) would be reflected in our information views and interruptions generated by our mobile devices.
Whilst we are tempted to think of spam at this point and annoying mobile coupons from the nearest coffee shop, there is no need to assume that an external agent is mining our data and interrupting us with their ads. I think that increasingly, companies will realise that they have to broadcast their essential real-time data through Web Services channels on the Internet. For example, B&Q will have to broadcast all their current offers, every day, 24*7, via Web Services channels. My smart mobile device will subscribe to these channels and pick up any interesting products that might be meaningful to me, given my recent grazing habits. If I've been looking at the prices of fitted showers, then info on this topic will be siphoned from the B&Q Web Services channel, especially, or only, when I get near one of their stores.
Seamlessness is the key: context-dependent information delivery on the mobile device, which takes into account all my current info-grazing habits. Cookies on websites is just one possible way of doing this, but there are plenty of others that will become more apparent as we get nearer to a true "anywhere area network". From a recent experience with a class, one student came up with the idea of a shared shopping list application. The idea itself was interesting enough, but I have not been able to drop the concept ever since it was raised. Shopping is something most of us do regularly and with all kinds of emotional, physical and financial investments. It seems so obvious as a candidate to bring this activity completely into the digital, and mobile, world. I can already think of so many benefits, especially using mobile technology, that will be hard to let go off once we become habituated to putting our shopping lists into the digital domain......
....watch this space for more thoughts on the topic.
12:21:20 AM 
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