The Brian Manley

I love watching movies. Who doesn’t? But my cinematic preferences are quite disjoint with my wife’s. This is a bit annoying, because one of the fun things about watching movies is talking about it! Especially if the movie is insufferably lame. Let the sarcastic remarks flow! Watching alone, for me at least, takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the experience.

So what to do when you want to watch Dune for the 67th time, but there is no one around to watch with? This is the age of social-everything, so why not watch with your online friends? Make inappropriate comments, pause, rewind and slow-mo the scene of the exploding head, talk about how old the leading man looks and how hot the cyborg sex-pot leading lady is.

How might you do this online, in a social networking style experience?

Well, first of all, you need the movie to stream. Let’s just ignore this problem for now and assume that we’re Hulu or Amazon or Netflix…we’ve got the content and the ability to stream it.

To kick things off, I invite a bunch of my online friends to join my “virtual theater”, where tonight at 8pm, we’ll be watching Strange Brew. I do this via Twitter or Facebook or whatever. The invitation includes a web link which directs them to a virtual lobby where we all gather and wait for the show to start. During this time, we can chat about the movie about to be shown or whatever…chit chat.

Now, at precisely 8pm, the movie starts. Everyone that was invited is now watching the movie, which is streaming to each of our computers and is synchronized so that we’re all watching the exact same scenes at the exact same times. This is critical.

While watching the stream, we’re also watching each other. Each user’s webcam and microphone is streaming upstream so that we can see and hear each other. When a scene is funny, we all laugh together. When it’s scary, we all scream together. Just like we would be in the theater or in your apartment. Fun, right?

Of course, you can easily imagine this being extended to television shows and sporting events.

Somebody. Please. Steal this idea.

I hate advertising. Hate it. And it’s not because I’m not interested in what services or products are available. Got an interesting gizmo, doo-dad or jeejaw, and I’ll be the first in line to pick one up. The problem with advertising is that advertisers take a shotgun approach to targeting. This is especially true in television, where targeting seems to be focused on age or gender and not much else. The web is a bit better in that sites often have a much narrower demographic than, say, the latest NBC sitcom.

Still, this is a scattershot approach. Just because I’m on your site doesn’t mean I fit your demographic. For example, I just pulled up the site for the FOX show “House”. The advertisement was for Windows 7. I use a Mac. The main FOX site shows ads for AT&T. I already have AT&T. Those bits and my attention where just wasted because FOX (or its advertising network) attempted to guess what I wanted. Or, maybe they didn’t guess at all. Either way, it was opportunity lost for the host and the advertiser.

A better approach would be to actually ask me what I’m interested in. Then ONLY hit my eyes with advertising that appeal to my specific interests. This is what I call Consumer Specified Advertising.

These interests might be general (gadgets, for example) or specific and time limited (vacations to Mexico in May). They might even vary during the time of day, or my current location. For example, if I’m working from my work computer, an advertiser might try to focus ads related to my work interests. While at home, I could receive ads for interests related to hobbies, etc.

Doing this on a site-by-site basis won’t scale of course. If I have to enter advertising preferences on every web site I frequent, I won’t do it. But if I could provide that information to a central location and let sites know about that location when I visit their pages, then it wouldn’t be such a chore. Additionally, my preferences can follow me to ever site I visit. By doing this, I hopefully never see another ad for mortgages or cruises when I’m not likely to purchase such an item.

So, here’s how I believe something like this could work:

1. Create a online service where I can store my preferences. My preferences consist of words chosen from a controlled vocabulary or loose folksonomy of topics. Each of these preference items are represented by a URL, which when resolved returns a list of synonyms or similar terms to the preference value I’ve set.
2. Serve my preference values from a single URL. Perhaps my preferences can be found at http://www.csa.org/thebrianmanley. Fetching that URL returns my list of preferences and some number of similar terms. Alternately, if I have a web site of my own, I can simply host a file containing my preferences there.
3. Tell my browser where my preferences URL can be found. Using a plugin of some sort, configure my browser to include a HTTP header that indicates where my preferences URL is. For example, a header such as “CSA-Profile: http://www.csa.org/thebrianmanley”. The browser should then, for every request I make, include that header.
4. Implement, on the server, a method to fetch my preferences URL, extract the preferences I’ve set and then find advertising that matches those preferences.
5. Profit!

It’s easy to see how you could also extend this in several ways. For example, including a list of my friends; their preferences can be fetched and used to enhance my own since we’ll probably have similar interests and tastes. Also, let me “announce” in my preferences what I’ve bought so that advertising for accessories, refills, whatever could be shown to me.

Yes, there are issues. How do you get people to opt-in to something like this? Is the promise of better advertising enough? You also need to get content providers to buy in and either partner with an ad network or create your own. Not a weekend project, for sure.

Now, somebody get cracking on this so I don’t have to see another stupid home mortgage ad ever again!