Recommender systems - the future of the Internet

Recently I stumbled upon a newfangled trend: recommendation systems, - on a particular representative of Surfingbird (no, I am not an employee of this company). Immediately the question arose, how can I make money on it , is it not worth preparing for another change in the pattern of user behavior on the network?

Why so serious?

No, I am far from impulses and I do not think that today / tomorrow something will change. But, this service is completely different from what was previously offered in various “backfilling” sites, and this proves the growing popularity of the resource (statistics can be viewed on the Surfingbird website in the “About Us” section).
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Why do I think that soon there will be a shift in how people use the Internet?

Internet today

Search

Search engines really transformed the Internet. People no longer need to leave bookmarks, afraid to forget something useful. “There is everything” is the motto of today.

Google brought the search idea to the limit by embedding its search in the Chrome address bar and using your Google+ interests for search results. What could be simpler: entered into the search box what you need and immediately went to the site. Brilliant!

But!

Yes, there is one "but." And this “but” is associated with those who sit on the other side of the monitor. I think many have come across this from their own personal experience: people do not always know what they want, and even if they do, they are not able to ask the right questions in order to get the necessary information.

For such a case were invented ...

… social networks

The social network solves all these problems with questions and allows a person to hang out with the disabled CNS in his Internet world: groups, friends, friends, friends, news feeds. At the same time, he is periodically “chosen” at will through links to external sites that skip here and there. Social networks are not sharpened for the distribution of their traffic. The average number of pages visited (at least 10 for different social networks) shows this unequivocally.

But in this celebration of life there is a significant drawback. This is the monotony of the format. If you go to the same scenery in the same form day after day, even with the CNS turned off, it is tiring. And here come the recommendation systems.

Recommender systems. What could happen next?

Unlike social. the scenery networks are always changing here. The system is very austerely huddled in the upper part of the browser so much so that the idea immediately appears to replace the address bar with this bar. I don’t know if it came to the creators of Surfingbird, they hardly have a resource to promote their browser like Google Chrome, but it’s obvious that someone like Google (Yandex, ay!) Can simply buy a startup by making it his soc. network and browser integrated mechanism of working with the Internet ... And if you recall (in the case of Google) about Chrome OS, then you can imagine the complete integration of all computer activity of a person into the Internet.

This would be an excellent option for a mass audience that “enters” on the Internet through the letter “e” on the desktop. For an ordinary person (not a geek), this approach is intuitively much more logical. Here he “came in”, looked where his familiar friends went, looked at selected sites, looked new. Typical behavior in social. networks (only sites instead of groups), but less limited in format.

What happens to the geeks? Will the old "search"? My personal opinion is that it will be an atavism, such as a Terminal (bash, zsh, etc), which only programmers use.

Conclusion

Recommender systems such as surfingbird can be an excellent link between search, browser and social. network, sticking everything together. This can achieve a powerful synergistic effect.

Approximately the same thing can be observed now at Apple with its iOS, which already in the next generation will almost completely connect a computer and mobile gadgets. Only in order to fuck a complete set of devices from Apple, you need to pay nearly $ 4000, and here everything can be completely free for the user. Is this not the basis for another breakthrough?

If this is a new trend, then it is preferable to jump onto the step of a speeding train now, before it is too late. Everyone can grasp this opportunity in their own way;)

UPD
As often happens on Habré, comments on the post turned out to be more interesting than the post itself. Thanks you :)