One of my good friends was browsing through the bestseller list for an audiobook to buy yesterday when she found an author totally against her philosophy ranking at #9. That led her to discount the entire list as “garbage” and untrustworthy.

Are bestseller lists and platinum records obsolete in the Internet age? Does anyone care what is popular now that we have access to the long tail and customization?

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October 7, 2007 and August 25, 2008 are dates that will likely be heralded as landmark achievements in user experience, yet live in infamy for our online independence. That is when Yahoo publicly launched Search Assist and Google Suggest graduated from Labs to the Google homepage. Suddenly search engines began finishing our sentences — or at least our keyword queries.

Web browsers had already begun implementing auto fill features to assist users with entering the same data in forms over and over. And so from a product manager perspective, the auto complete feature applied to a search engine makes complete sense. Indeed, the original Google Suggest remains a very useful research tool and has even been the subject of a few short studies. People don’t always know what they are looking for, and who better to ask for suggestions than like-minded searchers around the world?

It is also in the best interests of search engines to promote this feature heavily. Trim the long tail of queries to get eyeballs all on the same phrases and that will force advertisers to bid higher on a smaller set of keywords. Reduce the number of unique queries being searched upon and you speed up response time.

However, I think it is a mistake to enable it by default for everyone. Why?

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Facebook Beacon was one of the first major missteps for the massive social network that shared your personal data across partner websites. So they toned it down and allowed you to opt-out. Yet Facebook continued to collect data, and a class action lawsuit ensued forcing Facebook to terminate the service in late 2009. Now it appears that Beacon 3.0 is looming on the horizon due to pending changes to its privacy policy.

I am not surprised, especially in light of the PR disaster that was Google Buzz (contains profanity but in this case I believe it is well warranted).

When will companies learn that “pre-approving” these sorts of features equate to the type of behavior covered by CAN-SPAM? People do not want their data being shared without their explicit permission. What happened to double opt-in? This is something that should have been figured out 10 years ago. I guess companies get greedy after a while.