Age of Relevance

What will be the next breakthrough in the social web?

This question is almost the most favorite among all enthusiasts who devote themselves to technology and the Internet. The general trend has been felt for a long time - the transition from simple social services to personalized and relevant content.
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A key element of this transition is the increasing importance of the concept of "interest", along with the "social". Today, Facebook, Twitter and Google are working on delivering to the end user only content that is interesting to his surroundings, while some startups work exclusively with the interests of users, not looking at their “friends”.

Relevance is the only solution to the problem of information redundancy.


The matrix above shows the process of the emergence of various information services on the network over time.

Phase 1 : Search

Thanks to him, Google gained a dominant place on the Internet several years ago, using PageRank to determine the most popular pages in the opinion of other users.

Phase 2 : Web 2.0 and Social Bookmarks

In the era of Web 2.0, social bookmarking services have gained immense popularity, allowing you to quickly and efficiently track exactly the content that is relevant (interesting) to a specific user. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon still generate millions of web page views.

Phase 3 : Personal Recommendations

Services such as Hunch, GetClue, and some others focused on building a graph of user interests in order to bring them on the threshold of personalized recommendations generated using the “preference engine”.

Phase 4 : Personal Intuitivism

The latest set of grown-up startups focuses on personalization based on a combination of interests and social environment. Here, the term Personalized Serendipity fits best, an intuitive insight that Jeff Jarvis coined to describe sites like Gravity, my6sense, Genieo and TrapIt.

What is “relevance” really?

The battle against information redundancy is often presented as a choice between relevance (validity, interestingness) and popularity, where “relevance” is equal to “personalization” against popularity.

But, as is often the case, relevancy does not always mean personalization. Relevance is dynamic - it depends on the needs and requirements of the person in a particular period of time. There are situations when a user wants to find out the hottest (means popular) news or stories, and there are situations when this same user is looking for personal content - something that only he is interested in.

There are several approaches to filtering information and creating relevant, in this case popular, content from it. Google, Paper.li and PostRank are examples of filtering based on algorithms, while Reddit, Hacker News use a crowdsourcing approach (which is extremely effective in semi-closed social groups). Klout can be used to filter Twitter feeds by their influence, and Facebook uses social groups to filter news coming to the end user, and also extracts social signals from its new comments. Location (location) is another extremely effective signal for delivering relevant content to a user, especially in the world of mobile phones and technology.

In other words, relevance is inherent in each of the services listed in the matrix, and none of these approaches to creating relevance is ideal. There is no ultimatum approach to the concept of relevance. Henry Nothaft, CMO startup TrapIt, describes it as a "myth of the bright glade."

But even he understands that a competitive advantage will be obtained by someone who offers several ways to detect and filter relevant content, as well as make it flexible and accessible to any user.

Quora : an example of the use of interests

Quora is a pioneer in using the interests of users; moreover, interests serve as a dominant signal when generating a news feed for each specific user. Each new user is invited to follow topics of interest to him, as a process of familiarizing with the site, and each user immediately becomes clear that “following” topics is just as important as “making friends” with other users.

Quora's news feed of a particular user is an interesting example of what will actually happen if you confuse interests with the social environment. The result is amazing, this is the very dependence that many have experienced, but which is so difficult to explain. The new result is displayed in your feed not because you “made friends” with another user, but because you are “subscribed” to a topic that interests you.

This is what leads to the intuitive insight, or sudden relevance, which catches many people without allowing them to “jump off the needle.”

The war for the interests of users broke out between Facebook and Twitter last year. How did a young startup manage to win two companies with experience and serious finances in this game?

For a start it is worth noting that Quora was grown on the interests, they are also the basis of the structure of the web service. The “Browse Interests” column on Twitter is too general and primitive to use it effectively. And despite the fact that Facebook has a tool for publishing news in your feed, most of those who could publish them have not figured out the functionality and use of this tool (this is, of course, Open Graph).

By the way - this is the reason why the Like button now publishes the entire story in your feed. The future definitely belongs to the one who can most effectively handle the interests, needs and goals of users.

The use of relevance on the Internet, in the long term, can bring juicy benefits not only to users, but also to developers and advertisers. Better use of interests will lead to more accurate targeting, potentially reducing the cost of advertising based on CPM / CPC. Monetization will be calculated from indicators of the subscriber base and transactions within the system, and not based on the growth of the user base. Online media will be able to concentrate on relevant indicators, such as the interests of the incoming user and the time he spent on the site, instead of primitive impressions and transitions.

Social media is likely to soon realize that “quantity” is worse than “quality” in any perspective. Then the transition from the number of friends / followers and traffic to systems in which the relevance, reputation and popularity of the content will play a big role begins.

Moreover, today interests are used to more clearly build social ties. Interests will be replaced by tastes, finances, locations, and so on, making the variety more and more relevant.

via TechCrunch