Creepy Convergence

It’s been pointed out to me that I’ve been going for some days about Erlang, so please consider this my brief respite from Erlang evangelism :-)

I came across this ad during my evening blog crawl yesterday:

The part that kinda creeps me out is that I browsed all of the books listed earlier in the day at Amazon. Technically I can see how this was done pretty easily. I was logged in to my Amazon and I’m sure Amazon keeps track of the books I view while I’m at their site. Somehow the ad is matching up something (a cookie?) and cross referencing it with my Amazon account thus displaying select bits of my most recently browsed list.. Hmmm, the more I think about this the more I should’ve checked to see who was serving the ad. In any case, this kind of unexpected relevance in ads is unsettling.