PrefPass is a new project aimed to offer users a personalized experience on a wide variety of sites without giving up personal information or going through tedius registration forms. It will also let site publishers deliver more targeted content and advertising without being intrusive towards their readers. It’s a very cool idea; if you like BugMeNot.com, a site for pooling dummy accounts to news sites that require account registration, then you’ll really like PrefPass. It’s a win-win situation for everyone who participates.
PrefPass, which is currently in private beta, was developed by Adam Marsh of San Francisco. You can request a beta account on the home page.
Users provide URLs of sites they associate themselves with, like their blogs or their favorite sites to read. The categories and tags found in those site, presumably from other sources as well, are grabbed as “prefs” or things you are interested in. When you visit a web site that is participating in PrefPass, you can click a button on that site to grant a pass for the site to view your prefs or interests. The site can then serve up a variety of customized content, ranging from recommended blog posts for that site, recommended blog posts all around the web, news search results via Yahoo! or, of course, advertising contextual to your personal preferences.
Site publishers receive reports detailing the interests of their site’s visitors who have granted a PrefPass. The image here is from the sidebar of my personal blog, Marshallk.com, and lists posts recommended to me after I identified myself as interested in TechCrunch and granted MarshallK.com a PrefPass to view my interests.
There are little things that would be nice to see changed before the service leaves beta, like it would be good for the list of recommended posts to only appear after users have granted a site a PrefPass – right now site visitors not logged in are seeing all the most recent posts. It would also be nice to have more control over the number of items that appear in any of these widgets. If the search/RSS/javascript play here could be as smooth as using Peter Cooper’s FeedDigest, that would be great.
It’s quite a smart system. The javascript respects each site’s CSS, there’s a nice variety of widgets available to publishers and the basic idea really seems to benefit both sides of the reader/publisher equation. The fact that your anonymity is maintained while the system proves that you are a real person with real interests is great. Prefpass makes it painless, almost fun, for readers to allow publishers to offer personalized, targeted content.
The service’s business model doesn’t appear to have been identified yet, but there is clearly no shortage of directions that could go. If the revenue generation part of things is pulled off well, and the system can go viral, I think PrefPass could be a big winner. BugMeNot is a minor annoyance to site publishers and isn’t super convenient for users – but it’s in every one’s interest to get PrefPass spread around.
Very cool idea. The concept of portable trust and preferences with decent security / privacy guarantees is long overdue on the web. Good luck guys.
Too many solutions to prollems that don’t need to exist. Sites shouldn’t hide stuff behind members areas if it’s free to join. Don’t they understand that they will get more traffic and more people coming back if they just did away with members only stuff?
“without giving up personal information or going through tedius registration forms.”
How exactly can I avoid registering on say for example, nytimes.com and yet be able to read its content using prefpass?
If a site/service has to suceed with the masses other than the techcrunch crowd, then it needs to solve some real problems.
Startup – the idea is that all participating sites would receive many of the benefits of registration without requiring their users to register personally with countless different sites. This is an idea that will solve problems wherever publishers get on board.
Marshall – Thanks much for the write-up, and the feedback!
Mike – Thanks for the kind words.
Pro SEO – Good point; I agree that many sites that wall off content shouldn’t do so. But the thing is, if you don’t get *some* info on reader prefs, it’s hard to make decent money on your ad space. The idea of PrefPass is to help sites get anonymous reader data without any hassles or privacy concerns. And that includes sites that don’t wall off anything! Check out my blog for an example.
Startup – Point well taken; but we’re just in private beta! Give us a chance, we’ll get some “mass market” publishers on board. In the meantime, you can check out an example of how a news site could use PrefPass at YourSuperNews.com.
To everyone who requested an invite, thanks for checking us out! We’re working down the list FIFO…in the meantime, we’ll be posting updates at the PrefPass blog.
Can anyone say ‘Web2.0, Non-Microsoft passport’ ?
Marshall,
Might want to set border=1 round that image so that it looks like its separate from the text in the post. Kind of hard to tell.
Onward!
Kevin
Thanks Kevin.
this seems very exciting. it should be helpful with a new project im working on. Only thing is that their website didn’t give to much info.
Mike & Adam, appreciate the response and further insight.
Adam,
I’ve followed the link to your blog as well as the newsite to further understand the use case. So, from what you’ve written and from what I understood I think this isn’t for sites that really require us to submit email address and other details so that they can later send me material of interest.
Also, this probably isn’t for the sites that offer only subscription based content?
I guess I’d wait for the invite to really understand this
nice job& great idea–> good luck!
I quite don’t see what Adam is visioning. I usually fill buch of garbage info on the site that I don’t need to purchase anything, so not an issue for me. Personalizatio means more Ad, more spam.