sarp centel

Click is a book by Bill Tancer, founder of Hitwise – a company that tracks online usage. This book is about understanding human behavior and drawing conclusions from aggregate online behavior such as search trends. It has a very interesting start talking about adult sites:

• Throughout the year, Thanksgiving is the day with least visits to adult sites since family members are around.
• On a daily basis, adult sites receive most visitors on Fridays, and least on Sundays. Having least visitors on Sunday is explained by religious beliefs but Friday is pretty counter-intuitive.
• 70% of the visitors are male, female visitors prefer erotic literature, whereas male counterparts prefer pictures and videos.

Another interesting claim is that the competitors of adult sites are social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook because their traffic trends show strong negative correlation.

Another counter-intuitive conclusion from this book is about prom dresses. Since proms are usually in May or June, one would expect people to look for dresses during May or April. However, search traffic for prom dresses starts peaking in January, showing a change in our behavior over the years.

Other parts of the book talk about our fascination about celebrities, failed resolutions, what people are afraid of etc.

Not all parts of the book are equally interesting, but there are a lot of counter-intuitive findings mentioned that makes us question our intuitions and beliefs. Overall, it’s worth reading if you are interested in learning more about humans via our online actions.

I like reading/learning more than thinking/imagining. But this is a learned habit, and I’d like to change that. So here’s a little thought exercise:

Imagine you are living in a smart home where all your electronic appliances are connected to the Internet. Just like web sites do, your home appliances have APIs that let you programmatically access and control them. Not just yours, but all your neighbors are connected to this home appliance network as well, so you can interact with your neighbor’s devices as well. What kind of mashups would you create?

• You can’t improve what you don’t measure: I’d like to have a real-time panel showing electric consumption of each device in terms of cost per minute, as well as aggregated measures, cost by room etc.
• Event based actions: While moving around the house, lights should go on an off automatically using sensors, no more light switches! I’d build a web based remote control panel that shows you the status of each device (temperature, on/off, time remaining etc.) and let’s you control them. When you exit the house, you should get a warning of devices you’ve forgotten to turn off.
• Smart control: Heating and air conditioning devices should retrieve local weather data from the internet and adjust the temperature accordingly.
• More interactive TV: You can see your friends’ text-based comments on the side while watching your favorite show. Or you can see related articles that help you better understand things referred in the show. I’d request a recording from my TV directly to my computer. Subtitles for shows in foreign languages. Reviews for movies I’d like to purchase…

There are definitely more interesting things to come …