It that so unusual? It’s probably rather dependent on whether I go in there a lot, which I don’t. He does, however, know quite a lot about me and stores it away in his memory. From what he said to me he knows:-
1. My favourite drink is Guinness and that’s pretty much all I drink
2. He knows I go on the train to London a lot as I will pop in for a pint on my walk back from the train station
3. He knows I smoke as I have to go outside and will leave my money on the bar whilst he’s pouring my Guinness
4. He knows I am male
Ok, so why the irreverent twitter about my local pub? Well, I was thinking that my company builds websites that learn about its visitors by their behaviour and was this a violation of privacy? The answer is “no”. The local barman sees me coming though the door and sometimes has a pint on the go, he says “hello” and if I’m in a suit and it’s around the time that the London train gets in he will ask if I had a good day in London. What he is doing is improving my experience, he’s treating me personally even though he doesn’t know my name - in fact sharing my name would seem wrong and too personal.
So why aren’t more websites like that? They should learn what I like and slant the content towards my interests. YouTube doesn’t do it; it only shows the most popular and latest videos of the day, which I hardly ever watch, so why waste my time downloading the content on that page - take a leaf out of Google’s book and just show the search bar.
More sites will certainly start to work this way and our new VITES platform certainly lets companies do that - it’s just a matter of time before it becomes the standard way to operate.