A Cookie Alternative
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Studies show that people are deleting cookies and cached files from their computer regularly, giving the web developer a new headache for tracking their visitors. Tracking your visitor’s movements on your site can be very beneficial for showing trends and increasing visitor stay length and revenue, if you adapt your site accordingly. There may be in the near future an alternative to cookies that could store more information and would be less likely to be deleted. Read the story from ClickZ to get the scoop.
An existing technology offering cookie-like functionality is gaining attention from publishers, marketers and others as a possible replacement for the ubiquitous, but potentially endangered, text files.
The technology, based on Macromedia’s Flash, is getting attention as awareness spreads of an apparent increase in user deletion of cookies. A JupiterResearch study recently found nearly 40 percent of Web users clear these text files from their machines on a regular basis. Because of the enormous consequences of cookie deletion for online marketing, analytics experts and ad technology vendors have since begun overtly addressing the potential of the “Flash cookie.”
The technology is based on a feature of Flash MX called “local shared objects” (SOs), which can easily be placed on a user’s machine by adding a piece of Javacript to a Web page. SOs are similar to cookies in concept and function. The main difference is Web users don’t know what SOs are, and are therefore unlikely to delete them. Additionally, commercial anti-spyware applications do not typically block these files, as they do cookies.
