Now this is just a bit too big brother for me. Although why we didn’t see it coming, I can’t say. The security issues we have are enough to think about. Now we have a lab that will define us as “entities” and based on our social interactions “relationships”, they will notify us of what we want to purchase!! They really don’t know me that well. Do they? I know Amazon.com does it based on our purchases but we’ve opt-ed for that when we purchased.
On Facebook, Mandy Jenkins, Social News Editor at The Huffington Post opined, ” Uh-oh, should we ‘little guys’ in social media be worried that Walmart’s moving into our business?”, which got my attention. I was not expecting what I read. I think this goes further than just invading the social media space.
From WalmartLabs - who knew they had Labs, I know we should have guessed – we are introduced to Social Gemone. @WalmartLabs defines the Social Genome as
” . . . a giant knowledge base that captures interesting entities and relationships of the social world.”
“. . . the Social Genome is indeed a crown jewel at WalmartLabs. It is a giant entity-relationship knowledge base built using a wide range of cutting-edge data management, semantic analysis, and human computation techniques. It is used to perform deep semantic analysis of social media, the result in turn is leveraged to power a broad array of social commerce applications.”
Don’t know if you’ve ever experienced a “Deep semantic analysis” but it sounds painful.
Additionally they list other offerings on the site labeled
- Social Commerce – using Social Genome to improve shopping experience ( no live link to this for further explanation)
- Social Analytics - Gaining customer insights from social data (ditto on the link and further explanation)
Granted, they may not care that I need further explanation. They don’t have to care. Not their job, really.
You decide what you think after you read the explanation page. Even if you decide you don’t want them to have your preferences it doesn’t matter. They deal in entities and relationships in social media and then sell to those entities with those particular relationships. You won’t even see it coming.
Reminds me of the CBS TV series Person of Interest where the “machine” kicks out numbers to identify which “irrelevant” will die if they are not helped by the characters in the series. I’ll watch it with a different point of view now. After reading about @WalmartLabs Social Genome the TV series doesn’t seem so futuristic does it?
Leave me a comment if you have a strong feeling about this issue and/or if you think we should back away from giving so much of ourselves over to social media.
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