When Is WhenU MeMe?

Following up on a tip from my colleagues at McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, I examined an interesting piece of software recently from a provider I’d not heard of before, a product called “MeMe,” made by MeMedia, Inc.

The installation was immediate upon launching the installer, with no EULA or other notification displayed until the software was running. The MeMedia Web site suggests the software is intended to supplement a user’s browsing and general use of the Internet by tracking usage (locally, the software assures) and then proactively searching out and alerting the user to additional content that matches the interest categories that MeMe has identified. The term “meocentrism” is cutely coined on the product’s web site to describe this. I also read a notice that the software may be used “in support of free software,” suggesting potential bundling. Oddly, visiting MeMedia’s home page results only in a page with a logo and “coming soon,” though several subpages are accessible and the software appears to be available and functioning. The interface is designed to resemble a three-dimensional cube, and uses many shadow and animation effects:

Peeking under the hood, I grabbed some of the network traffic to verify that no user-browsing data was in fact being transmitted. I was surprised to find communication with servers in the whenu.com domain, and even parameters being passed in HTTP transmissions such as “&app=whenusave.” Save! (also incarnated as “SaveNow”) is an advertising client product made by WhenU. I did not note any personally identifiable data being transferred to remote systems during a few limited tests, but the indications point to a mechanism similar to what WhenU uses in its advertisment products (running search terms against a local database to preclude the need for sending user data from the local system). It appears that the MeMe software is somehow leveraging WhenU’s infrastructure. Along with many overlapping IP addresses and DNS records, we have indications that MeMedia is in partnership with or wholly owned by WhenU.

Crossing into speculation, I find interesting the apparent repurposing of adware infrastructure as a “usage assistant”; something to help a user find content on general topics of interest rather than simply pushing comparative product offers. The vendor achieves the same goal of connecting a user with specific content; MeMedia could easily define and control the data set that the client software could search to find the user’s identified interests. Vendors could feasibly monetize additions to such a content repository as well as more direct targeted advertising. If my speculation is correct, such a scenario–though not far removed from traditional push-advertising models–might at least be better accepted by users. Although the field of data such a “meocentric” digital helper could sift through might really be a walled garden of sponsored content, the idea seems less intrusive than a pop-up hawking a widget.

On my test environment, which is essentially clean of any usage data, MeMe “found” an article on Michael Vick for me after running for several minutes. This occured even without my doing any browsing or other activity. I later found that several terms were apparently hard coded into the installer package (ExecuteParameters=”/i\”rock;Chicago Bears;Serena Williams;Michael Vick\”"), ensuring that the recipient would at least have some “interests” about which content could be “found” right off the bat.

It’s awfully kind of them to look out for us boring folk.