Sorry I didnt post this comment yesterday, but I wanted to make sure that I had a real answer, so I asked one of our developers at Lijit. Here was his response (would love to hear your thoughts):
Why Lijit uses them:
We use cookies to not only track whether someone is a Lijit user(allowing them to login etc), but also to allow us to match up a blog/widget visitor to any searches they may perform through our widget. This allows us to provide valuable metrics to our publishers in the form of stats, which in turn allows publishers to give their readers better content.
In general, to get the best functionality out of the Lijit widget, third party cookies should be allowed from lijit.com' href='http://lijit.com">lijit.com'>http://lijit.com">lijit.com .
Historically, advertisers were the primary users of third-party cookies. This would allow them to track your viewing behaviors across any properties where their ads appeared. Some people disliked this since there was no real value to the web user, and the advertisers got free data. This was perceived as not only a security issue , but also pushed the perception of third party cookies into a grey area. This drove browser developers to disable these cookies by default.
In the current world of social media , distributed web services, and widespread widget adoption, the value to the user has changed. There are many services, Lijit included, that offer value to the user during their browsing session, versus just “tracking†them. The key, is that the web user is informed about what sites they visit, and the kind of content they allow in their browser. It is important for companies to disclose how they use the information they collect, and Lijit does this in our privacy policy (http://www.lijit.com/privacypolicy)' href='http://www.lijit.com/privacypolicy">http://www.lijit.com/privacypolicy)'>http://www.lijit.com/privacypolicy">http://www.lijit.com/privacy_policy) .
Overall, the message should be about awareness and consumer education. The value of enabling third party cookies can actually be additive now, vs. being a cause for concern in the past. We ask users to enable third party cookies to get the most value out of our services. Modern browsers allow you to whitelist services you trust, and there are many services on the web that deserve that trust.
© 2012 http://www.jangro.com/
RSS
Jangmeister, I observed some friends shopping the other week, and learned something interesting, and would like to get your take on it, as well as your visitors. In some newer browsers, there's a third party cookie warning icon that shows in the status bar. IE's icon is an eyeball with the international symbol for no (red circle with angled slash in it). Two of three shoppers I recently observed, when they saw the icon, they volunteered to me (I didn't point it out to them) that the site was "spying" on them by using cookies. They said if the site wasn't one that they trusted (like Amazon), they'd bail on providing any information, like any purchase or signup. So, of late, I've become very aware of it's presence.
Your blog here uses two services that try to load a third party cookie - seesmic.com and lijit.com. I was using a social tag (addthis.com) that was doing the same thing on a site of mine. Having heard these shoppers reaction to the icon (one called it the "do not spy" symbol), I took down the service.
I have an affiliate site that serves up merchant images and that merchant was kind (sarcasm) enough to try to set a third party cookie when the image is called. I am planning to host the images on my own server, which I want to do for speed anyhow, given the adwords quality scoring issue regarding page load time - but doing so will also solve my third party cookie issue on this site.
So, question is, am I concerned (calling it worried would be an overstatement) about nothing here? Does my small sample size of my shopping observations have me over tweaked on this issue?
Assuming visitor's behavior is affected by it, and since seo algo's build in things that consumer's care about, do you believe there's an seo impact likely attached to having third party cookies called?
Most modern browsers default to block them anyhow, so should we contact these parties (addthis, lijit, etc) as webmasters and say "hey dudes/dudettes, knock the cookie calls off, you won't get data anyhow and you're thirst for data ain't helping us, and might even pimple our butt cheeks now and then"? Or do you think the data collection lust has become such a strong pull (Alexa comes to mind), that it'd be pointless to ask?