Robert Scoble Quotes

Britain and America are two examples where social media will only show you what you like.

Make sure you like, comment and share other people's items. That teaches Facebook what kinds of things you like to see in your feed.

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that.

We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.

My laptop seems to know where I am, even if I don't. My cellphone asks me if I want directions to anywhere from the spot I am standing in. I buy a record online and Amazon.com sends me letters, telling me that people who bought what I bought also bought these other records.

Anything you care about, from vacation plans to exercise to the best Ethiopian restaurant, is going to be guided by your individual search history.

I wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

I took the decision that everything I would post would be positive. If you say, 'Ahh, I feel terrible today,' and you spread that to the eyes and ears of millions of people, that's not good.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

It is probable that Facebook boasts the broadest, deepest, and most comprehensive dataset of human information, interests, and activity ever collected.

You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem? We're the only ones who know what it means to be Brand X.

The Internet is about giving the consumer exactly what they want, whether there's an audience of one or 1,000 or 10,000, and then figuring out how to make money on it later.

Now everyone leaking and tweeting and posting on everyone else is the acknowledged way to get ahead in the 21st century.

The more Zuckerberg knows about you, the more media he will be able to bring you.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

You can go to Pinterest, and they'll get to know who your friends are, but they don't get to know very much about what you've done in the past. They're starting with little information about you, and they have to do this personalization.

Facebook is teachable. If you hide items, you'll see fewer of those kinds of items in the future. Like more items, and you'll see more of those in the future.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Consumers are increasingly programming their own entertainment and content experiences.

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

The rise of digital technology put marketers in a bind. No longer a captive audience, consumers were splitting their time across devices, social networks and websites.

Caricatured as navel-gazers, Millennials are said to live for their 'likes' and status updates. But the young people I know often leverage social media in selfless ways.