Ziggs. Who is googling you. Creepy or useful?
Just when you thought I was packing it in for today…
Ziggs.com is a new social network that makes promises others don’t, won’t or can’t.
From College Of The Record:
Thanks to Ziggs.com, you can practically see who is Googling you. See, Ziggs is sort of like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn all rolled into one, but with the ability to make yourself more visible on the internet. To measure that visibility, a free membership to the social networking site provides Ziggs users emails every time someone Googles them and looks at their Zigg profile.
Before you get too nervous though, the service can’t go as far as to tell you exactly who the mystery Googler is. But it can get pretty, damn close… like uncomfortably close. CBS4 reports:
Ziggs alerts them to where the searcher is located, what time the search occurred and what key words were used in the search.
Once they get a nibble, they can spend time marketing to the people they know have some level of interest in their businesses.
The idea is to help users personally and professionally. If someone Googles a company, for example, that company can then tailor their marketing specifically to them. Creepy, much?
Now, I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but it’s certainly something we should all be thinking about. We’ve already gone places because of the internet, where once upon a time, we’d not have been even remotely willing to accept.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the internet and have since being part of the first batch of people where I live, to try out something better than dial-up. I have always though, understood that the internet is not unlike a wine glass. Lovely to have and use, makes everything better, but damn… it can cut you!
So I’ll be thinking about Ziggs a lot in the next short while, and I’ll be reading what I can find to make an informed choice. Here are some links to help you do the same too.
- Ziggs – Taken For a Test Drive
- Ziggs – zzzz
- Ziggs WebPro – Find out who is googling you
- Dear Mainstream Media, Ziggs.com Does Not Tell You Who Searches Your Name on Google
- The 50 Content Companies that Matter: Ziggs
- Profile of Ziggs for our Social Network Guide
- Ziggs Home Site
Upon first site, my immediate reaction was, “That’s not Sarah Palin, that’s Peggy Hill!”
He wouldn’t be the first. 
An alleged (Yahoo) news story is what’s causing the buzz, only there seem to be no actual reports of it, and often you end up at an Angelfire page showing a 2003 death hoax attempt. That story looks real until you notice, as with the other hoaxes… bad grammar and spelling errors. I won’t be giving them the benefit of a backlink, so if you want to see it for yourself, copy and paste the url into your browser… but remove the word ‘fake’ from the url first. Though they don’t get a link from me, your going there still gives them hits. If you’re ok with that, then go. If you’d like to deprive them of the hits too, feel free to view the screen cap of the full page (with location bar and all) by 
Goats… fooling the internet!
You Laid An Egg