On talking for free

It had to happen. California-based Pudding Media has introduced  a free Internet phone service. You "pay" by watching ads that pop up on your screen--ads carefully selected by a computer that listens in on your conversation. Pretty neat, huh? Haha! Just kidding! Well, actually, I am not.

So What?

Google already supplies context-sensitive advertising, albeit only in email: GMail shows you ads based on the contents of your messages. There was a hue and cry from privacy advocates when the arrangement was announced, but you don't hear much about it anymore. There's nothing like "free" to dull privacy fears and apparently many of us have made our peace with Google's increasingly detailed knowledge of our lives.

But. I can practically hear your head exploding at the thought of an ad broker listening to your phone conversations. Mail is one thing--it can be composed so as to avoid revealing anything you don't want to reveal. Spontaneous conversation, however, is qualitatively different: Having to "watch what you say" on the phone is inescapably Stalinesque and thus at least mildly distasteful. So you won't sign up, right? (Except there's that "free" thing again...)

What worries me is that on-screen ads can be ignored (just turn off your monitor), and Pudding Media knows it. I predict a new offering that gets around that problem: audio ads that are actually inserted into your conversation. So every 60 seconds, an ad would begin. Five or ten seconds later it would finish, leaving you free to talk again. Think you wouldn't stand for it? It's no different from pausing your conversation while a fire truck passes, something we do very naturally today.

And look on the bright side: it could be fun! Making a computer spot words in a stream of arbitrary speech is very difficult--a lot of smart people have broken their pick on the problem over the years. Who knows what kinds of bizarrely inappropriate ads might pop up in response to the inevitable misunderstandings? This behavior might even become an art form of some sort: I could imagine albums of particularly funny ad-spiced phone conversations, sort of like collections of Crank Yankers calls.

In any case, Pudding Media is clearly on to something. I'd like to think that we are strong enough to resist the siren song of "free" service, but our record isn't good in that regard (think of TV, radio, newspapers, magazines and, of course, GMail, all of which are ad-supported)--I predict that we'll embrace phone-vertising wholeheartedly when it finally oozes onto the market. Somewhere, Stalin is probably laughing.