Abstractions for Metrics and Targeting - extending OpenSocial « Searching for the Moon
Shannon always adds a lot to conferences with his questions. I also like that he has such a great interest in discussing matters over a terrific meal. I sure valued his contributions last spring at Podcast Hotel.
A real insightful number of ideas starting to flow around this whole concept of web applications and abstractions.
Hurray for Kevin Marks in urging people to think about organic growth. In his view, applications should be part of the “social ecology,” “making both the site and the user richer by their presence.”
Shannon has some concepts of his own about ad networks and their role with appications and social networks that could be used as a context in terms of how to measure an application and perhaps its organic value:
My initial suggestions would be to define active vs. inactive states so that an application can report back when a user is active (and we define what that means) within the application. A further refinement to this abstraction would be to measure the time in each state again with uniform ways to start and stop that clock.
Additionally a defined way to count events within the use of an application potentially including a measure of where within the application attention is paid could be highly useful as well. This might start by building on similar tools that are already used to track web activity and interactions. In the OpenSocial (and widget case more broadly) one complication being how to log and report back these metrics in a standard manner.
Ideally these metrics probably should flow back to the hosting social networks, to the application provider, and potentially (and again this needs clarification) be shareable with third party providers - such as an ad network (like the one I’m building).
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