While I agree to an extent, the issue I see is that business partners, friends, etc likely know you far better than a site you enter curated information into in order to reach an end goal ever will.
The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
It’s not safe to assume that putting information into a profile means that they want it be utilized in a programmatic search or be collected off-site for marketing use.
Users have a wide range of potential motivations for using IG. I know a good cross-section of startup founders and another cross-section of artists and the use-case and expectations for both groups is wildly different!
Further, many IG users are simply using it as the latest iteration of Facebook. Scraping personal information — even if it’s exposed in their profile — might feel like a violation of the relationship they expect to have with a vendor in IG.
This is just, like, my opinion, man.... and I don’t know if it can work for your business but if you find your way out of this mess I encourage you to look at it more from the perspective of users who engage heavily with you, not users who have the most leverage. A subset of your engaged users will also have a lot of leverage.
You want your evangelists to evangelize because they really believe in you. You can manage a relationship with a small number of good evangelists personally rather than through a soulless mass E-Mail (or whatever medium you might use).
A rev share (like you were trying to do) is great but you want to think about it like you’re supporting your key evangelists and reducing their friction in talking about what you’re working on.
I understand how the information is public and therefore free to use. All I'm saying is that it sounds great in theory, until someone goes ahead and makes your profile and gathers up your personal info and lets people rate you. I didn't ask for it explicitly or implicitly so it is annoying.
That gives me an idea. What if there was a paid service which would analyze such public information about you and tell you exactly what your "profile" looks like, or at least appears to others. Sometimes we don't realize how we project ourselves and this would definitely be useful to understand the implications of our actions.
It's not for bragging rights, but if someone is doing their "due dillies" and comes across your profile, that might speak to your credibility in particular domains.
I might have edited my comment as you submitted yours.
I do recognize that is a point of failure. The only companies that know me in such a manner are Amazon, Facebook, and Google (Gmail and calendar, and I'm going to be changing that). Third parties could otherwise piece together what websites I visit to get a more in-depth picture of who I am more so that what Amazon can figure out from my purchase habits; Facebook can figure out from who my friends are, what I like, pictures I'm in, etc; and from what Google could by reading my e-mails or seeing the events in my calendar.
But isn't google's whole schtick about creating a personal profile just about you? Maybe they think you are in the market for some offshore v!agra or would like to get in on the ground floor of some crypt0 investment opportunity...
It's also quite disconcerting to consider the implications of this. Since we 'opt in' to the articles we click on, tracking what individuals read and then building a profile based off of that would be quite informative, and quite invasive.
And then sharing, trading (to expand the profile), and selling it to other companies? Really nasty stuff.
Doesn't supplying all this info about myself just confirm that it is correct, thus further putting my privacy at risk?
> For each user, we typically turn up 2X – 5X more profile match results than Google, or any of our competitors
How? Is it different than manually looking up my info at each site listed under "which data brokers are covered by each plan?"
Not a bad idea for a business, you sell them my data then charge me to have them delete it. I didn't know you had competitors though, now I'm comparing your features to theirs.
I don't put that much data out, but I don't mind being profiled. I like being suggested music that I'm susceptible to like based on other people. I think it's fine if one can infer out of my lifestyle that I would be interested in x or warn for risks of y.
What is wrong with it ? I'm probably no statistical anomaly, I don't mind being part of some artificial cluster somewhere, helping having a more accurate portrayal of a type of people. I am not interesting enough that anyone will come for me specifically anyways.
And from time to time, I see worried and lamenting people like here, and I still don't get it.
>2. The profile of users don't reflect who they truly are. It represent what they want to be, or at least how they want to be percieved by others. Admittingly this problem is also present when doing surveys.
Do you realize that you are saying what you think people are?
Which is which? who they really are and what they really want to be. Is Clark Kent real or Superman real? This is why sociologists have day jobs.
The desirability of your profile aside, it's entirely credibly that any profile you create is a poor representation, many people may not know what it is about themselves that others like.
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