Comments on: Implicit Personalization on Tribe.net

By: Jordan

Jordan — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It got my state right, but it didn’t give me my city/town. Guess it’s just not populous enough ’round here…

By: Ryan Oswald

Ryan Oswald — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

too bad that’s the only cool thing about the site!

By: Tony C

Tony C — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just today I stumbled across another example of this. I was looking for prices on flat-front Dockers Mobile Pants. When I visited the Dockers Mobile Pant page, it asked me to select a location nearest me, and had my city (Sacramento) listed first...Cool.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Geof: Yep, it's Safari. I'm using the "Milk" theme to customize my OS though. More info available over at Veerle's place.

By: Geof Harries

Geof Harries — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mike,

What browser is that in your screenshot? The buttons look like Safari but the other widgets seem customized.

thanks

geof

By: Gil

Gil — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It does actualy work intenationaly. I just surfed to tribe from an Israeli (il.com) domain and got directed to http://israel.tribe.net/local?guess=true, which had local events listed. VERY neat, and second time I surfed over, the ?guess=true was gone, maybe because I klicked some links, showing I was from Israel?

By: chris vale

chris vale — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There are any number of problems using an ip to location lookup. The most noticeable is the case where our data is wrong and the next is you get routed through a remote router. Both these cases end up looking bad. The problem for UK users (or anywhere outside the US) is that although the ip lookup tells us your location we can’t do much with that because we don’t have any non-US localized sites. We dump you into SF because its one of our most active regions. There’s no technical reason for this other than our product team doesn’t think outside the US.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kevin: That’s good information. Didn’t know that. It’s probably ok for a site like Tribe to make errors on international domains because I think they probably don’t offer international services, but it’s a bigger issue for companies who do, no doubt.

By: Chad Baker

Chad Baker — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As long as the content is truly relevant to only a certain geographic region, I can see why they’d attempt such a trick. As a first time user of the site, however, I’d rather know what’s going on and why I should stick around.

Also, I’m in Orlando and my company routes our internet traffic through our main location in NYC … I therefore got the NYC version of Tribe.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

i figured philly was big enough to be detected correctly…i guess not. i got washington d.c.

since i have never been to tribe.net, if i had gone there without having the luxury of reading his post, i would have glanced at the “washington d.c” in the header and would have closed the page, probably without ever seeing the “change location” button.

i checked with our head tech guy to see where our isp is, but it’s close enough to hit with a rock from here.

interestingly enough, when you do follow the “change location” link, philadelphia is in extra big letters…

it’s a gamble i suppose they decided to take. how many of you would take the same kind of gamble?

By: waylan

waylan — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, they got the state right for me as well, but not this rather small city. Probably only gets that specific for the bigger cities. Still pretty slick.

By: Kevin Cheng

Kevin Cheng — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The problem is the many countries have major ISPs that route themselves through North America because the infrastructure is more established there and can sometimes yield better results. This has often been suggested as a solution for internationalization where sites have global offices but while guessing right is great, guessing wrong is really really bad because you can’t guarantee the visitor even noticed that you tried to guess.

And yes, Google tries the same. I’ve seen google Hong Kong, UK and Canada all pulled up at the various locations I’ve opened my browser of late.

By: Mark Payne

Mark Payne — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I noticed the same thing through the same link. I was quite impressed.

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It is smart… I hadn’t yet noticed this type of behaviour in the content of a site, but I had seen it in the advertising on less scrupulous domains. (“Adult personals are waiting for ME in Toronto…”)

Is it possible that Google does the same thing? Or is that just the Google Cookie getting set when I first visit Google.ca?

By: Trent

Trent — Tue, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Other than WHOIS, is there any other available process used to grab information (region, company) via IP? Or are these “geo-locator-blah data collection companies” simply cataloguing this public information and reselling it?