Thursday, August 24, 2006
Ziki Tests Online Identity Management With Google AdWords
byZiki, the personal content aggregator I’ve written about before, is testing a new feature where they purchase Google AdWords for some of the names of their users — including me! — to make sure you show up at the top during searches on your name. Sound familiar? If you’ve been reading this blog it should, that idea also happens to be the entire feature set of Naymz. The difference being that Ziki, as far as I can tell at this point, is offering it for free as an enhancement to their already nice feature set. To be fair, Naymz also offers a free version in addition to the $5/month service, unfortunately they don’t offer anything else to go with it.
In my previous review of Naymz, I wasn’t all that excited about it and didn’t see any value being offered. While the Ziki feature is identical in nature, I think that since it is an additional touch on top of other features that it is harder to knock. I’m sure if you were to take any of the active users of Ziki and do a Google search on their name that they’d show up on the first page. Since Ziki aggregates all of your content from the blogs and sites you participate in, chances are you’re generating a lot of content with your name attached. Still, I have to admit, it is sort of cool to see your name as the headline of an AdWords ad.
I wouldn’t pay for this feature, but as a free add-on to an already great service I think it’s fine. Ziki itself is probably a service I would pay for if the cost were reasonable. Of course, I like the fact that it is free now, so I hope they can find a way to keep it free. If you’re an active participant online, I’d recommend checking out Ziki and give it a try.
