Top 5 Web Trends 2009: # 3 Personalization

Personalization is often used to organize a real-time user environment on the Internet. Ken Fromm wrote in an article for ReadWriteWeb : “The Internet is transformed from separate unrelated websites into separate islands of information that are organized specifically for you because it uses statistical information about you or You set your own preferences and tastes. ”

If you use Dashbrods such as TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr for using Twitter, then you can group people, topics or keywords. This is a good example of effective personalization.


Open Internet: more information about you - better personalization.
')
Another aspect of personalization is the wide dissemination of open information on the Internet. Many companies open access to information through APIs, web services, or open standards. And most of this information is structured (see the first trend), which allows third-party developers to much better “process” this information.

How does open information improve personalization? Very simply, the more information available about you and your social activity, the better it will be processed and you will get the most targeted content or service. Undoubtedly this is a serious challenge, the concept of privacy will change, but still the gain from personalization is much higher.

Here is a list of “open information” standards on the Internet, it includes:

Data portability - each site shows the activity of your friends and your personal information is available.

OpenID - one login to any sites.

OpenSocial - creating a widget that will work in all social networks supporting the standard. Google Initiative; MySpace supports Facebook no technology.

APML is a growing standard about your “attention.” Information about your attention is what you read, write, what you share with friends, and what you consume.

Recommendations.

Many websites that sell something are trying to recommend things that might be of interest to you. A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold highlighted in his opinion 4 main approaches in the recommendations :

Personalized recommendations - recommendations that are based on your past behavior.

Social recommendations - recommendations based on the behavior of several similar users in the past.

Subject recommendations - recommendations based on the properties of the subject that is recommended to you.

Mixed recommendations 3 given types of recommendations.

Amazon is probably the leader in quality of recommendations on the Internet, but in 2009 a new example of personalization development was given, in March Netflix launched an improved personalization . The gradations of user preferences have changed, a new personalized home page has appeared, the ability to mix genres.

Conclusion

Personalization developed in 2009 not as fast as the structuring of information or the Internet in real time , but we believe that personalization will become one of the key aspects of the developing Internet.

Trend number 1
Trend # 2