And They Thought TiVo Was Bad

As if tracking online ad impressions wasn’t difficult enough for advertisers, Apple Computer is showing up to the party with their own twist on what their customers can do to any website.

It’s called WebClip and it resides within Mac OS X’s Dashboard layer. Dashboard is essentially a hidden layer of your desktop where numerous applications can function like a calculator or stock ticker.

WebClip allows you to simply drag a simple rectangle over any chunk of a webpage and then instantly capture it as what is called a “widget”. This widget then floats either on the Dashboard layer or, in the near future, as an actual window on your desktop that you can show and hide at-will.

So, what makes this scary to advertisers?

If I want the top headlines from CNN’s website, I will never have to actually see the ads or the full page again. Now just imagine someone making multiple WebClips of your page while excluding the ads.

[ORIGINALLY POSTED HERE]