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FourthParty is here

Aug 15, 2011  By Doc Searls
 in
FourthParty.info

Back in March of '09, I posted Get ready for fourth party services here, calling them "a classification for user-driven services" and "a place where a vast new marketplace can open up, serving customers first". (Or users, if they're not paying, which is the case for most of what we get free (as in beer) on the Web.)

Later I unpacked it a bit, in VRM and the Four Party System, over at ProjectVRM, where I've been encouraging user-serving development and research over the last few years. While the VRM development community has been using "fourth party" quite a bit (see Phil Windley's postings here and here), we haven't seen the term much outside the community.

That is, until yesterday, when I ran across this tweet by @Jonathan Mayer, courtesy of a re-tweet by the Wall Street Journal's @WhatTheyKnow folks:

We've open sourced FourthParty, the web measurement platform in our Tracking the Trackers studies. 

Explains the About page,

FourthParty is an open-source platform for measuring dynamic web content. Unlike many previous web measurement tools FourthParty is built on a production web browser, Mozilla Firefox, lending it the ability to:

  • monitor realistic interactions with web applications, crowdsource data from actual users,
  • take advantage of existing browser extensions and automation tools, and
  • run on just about every modern desktop operating system.

FourthParty is fast, modular, and already generating research results. Get started measuring the web!

So there's your cue. I'll be interested to hear who lines up to help and what they find (or help find).

 

______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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What is benefit of using Ubuntu ?

Linux The Best's picture
Submitted by Linux The Best (not verified) on Fri, 10/21/2011 - 01:10.

can any one suggest me about the benefit of Ubuntu as i am newbie in Ubuntu ..please help me find some tutorial about Ubuntu..

If this VRM software is the

Abaculus's picture
Submitted by Abaculus (not verified) on Mon, 10/17/2011 - 05:27.

If this VRM software is the customer version of vendors CRM systems, is there perhaps something to be gained by linking the two together programmatically, like B2B supplier-to-vendor stock ordering systems? Perhaps with standards like XBRL?

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