"People bristle at personalization just for the sake of personalization," said Tiffany Barnett White, the professor who headed the research. Barnett White found that relevance was one important factor in increasing recipient interest, but ultimately it was the actual value being offered that made the lion's share of the difference in peoples' reaction. At a time when information overload is often being responded to by varying degrees of personalization, we believe this study is worthy of consideration.

What This Means

We would argue that this behavior is probably common in online communication in general. If your service is personalizing its messages to users for anything but a very good reason, it's probably a bad idea. Flickr's "welcome [username]" in various languages around the world is cool - but other forms of fake personalization are not. Now we've got the numbers to prove it.

We've written here about how we want to get RSS feeds from PR agencies, not just emails - but the pseudo personalized emails are pretty obnoxious. The most obnoxious are emails personalized with our competitors' names! (This happens at least once a week.) We also receive any number of other emails from online training services, conferences and others that include some personal information. Especially when this personalization tricks us into opening the email, then we really get angry at whoever sent us that email.

We are interested to know whether you, [Reader'sName], feel the same way - or if you are someone who uses this kind of personalization in your online communication and have seen different results.

Image from Beth Kanter

Last April, we held a contest asking readers for their web 3.0 definitions. Our favorite came from Robert O'Brien, who defined Web 3.0 as a "decentralized asynchronous me."

"Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me," he wrote. "[Web 3.0 is] about me when I don't want to participate in the world. It's about me when I want to have more control of my environment particularly who I let in. When my attention is stretched who/what do I pay attention to and who do I let pay attention to me. It is more effective communication for me!"

What O'Brien was getting at is basically what Kiss was getting at: personalization and recommendation. And that's the promise of the Semantic Web. The easiest way to sell the Semantic Web vision to consumers is to talk about how it can make their lives easier. When machines understand things in human terms, and can apply that knowledge to your attention data, we'll have a web that knows what we want and when we want it.

ReadWriteWeb contributor Sramana Mitra put it another way on this blog last February, when she said that web 3.0 will be about adding context to personalization. "Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context," she wrote. "In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, ... and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context." Or in other words, web 3.0 will be about feeding you the information that you want, when you want it (in the proper context).

Of course, the versioning of the Internet is kind of silly, and probably shouldn't keep going, but it is a fun way to look to the future and predict what we might be coming our way. What do you think of Kiss's idea about web 3.0 being about recommendation and personalization?

This is the basic idea behind Facebook's once controversial "Instant Personalization" program, which brings the personal reviews, tastes, opinions and browsing habits of you and your friends to external websites. Today, that program has expanded once again to include Internet T.V. guide Clicker.

Already, Facebook was working with a number of sites to offer personalized content. When the feature was first announced, it was working with Pandora, Yelp and Microsofts Docs.com, covering two of the bases mentioned above - food and music. Then, in September, the social network partnered up with movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. Following additions of Bing and Scribd, Clicker will make the seventh site to join the Instant Personalization program.

Moving on to something like Clicker is a smart next step for the program. The integration will show you what your friends are watching, what they're doing on Clicker, and offer you recommendations based on your Facebook "Likes" and interests. As Facebook says in its introduction, "Now you can spend less time channel surfing and more time socializing--no remotes, listings or passwords required."

What's next for Instant Personalization? What do you rely on your friends for that you just don't trust to the Internet? One thing that comes to mind is "What's going on tonight?" instead "What's on tonight?", but is handled by Facebook's own events feature. Will we see Instant Personalization come to Plancast or Upcoming?

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Filtering the Real-Time Firehose

Personalization is often used to provide an organization layer for users on top of real-time data. As Ken Fromm put it in his primer on the Real-Time Web:

"The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences."

If you use a dashboard product like TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr to use Twitter, then you're able to group people, keywords and topics. This is effectively personalization at work.

Open Web: More Data About You, Better Personalization

Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the Web. A lot of companies make their data available on the Web via APIs, web services, and open data standards. And as we discussed in the first post in this series, much of that data is structured - allowing it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties.

How does open data lead to personalization? Simply put, the more data about you and your social graph that is available to be used by applications, the better targeted the content and/or service will be to you. There are non-trivial privacy issues about this, however the personalization benefits can be significant.

There are a whole host of open data standards on the Web now. They include:

• Data portability - taking your data and friends from one site to another.
• OpenID - portable identity; single sign-on.
• OpenSocial - Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn't.
• APML - growing 'Attention' standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume.

Recommendation Engines

Many consumer products on the Web aim to recommend you things that you may like. A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold outlined what he saw as the 4 main approaches to recommendations:

• Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior
• Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users
• Item recommendation - recommend things based on the item itself
• A combination of the three approaches above

Amazon is probably still the best example of recommendations on the Web, but an example of something new from 2009 was Netflix launching better personalization features in March. They included new taste preferences, allowing users to (for example) choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark. Other additions included a personalized homepage and a feature enabling users to mix and match genres.

Conclusion

Personalization has shown slow but steady progress in 2009. It hasn't been as wild a ride as Structured Data or Real-Time Web, but we consider personalization to be a key facet of the evolving Web.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009:

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

Image credit: davepatten

Facebook is calling this new partnership an opportunity for its users to "read together" by offering "reading recommendations based on what your friends are sharing and on your Facebook likes and interests". We're interested in seeing how this will actually play out, however. With other site integrations, we were looking at adding the context of our Facebook social graph to existing functionality. With Scribd, however, it feels like trying it's trying to make Scribd a destination rather than a tool. For the most part, we used Scribd to easily share PDF files with each other - we didn't go there to browse and find content. Pandora, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes, however, all had that aspect in common - they were destinations that could be enhanced by Facebook's instant personalization feature.

Nonetheless, we think that the importance of this addition lies in the fact that it evidences Facebook's commitment to expanding its instant personalization program. After several months of lying dormant, we have two new additions and we expect to see more in the near future. We have to wonder how long it will be until instant personalization becomes the default, rather than the exception. When might sites stop implementing their own Facebook integrations and sign on to have users automatically integrated the second they show up?

The feature brings users' social graph and likes on Facebook to other sites, such as Pandora and Yelp. Beginning today, those same features will come to movie rating and review site, Rotten Tomatoes.

Well, for those of you who didn't chose to opt-out, Facebook has automatically opted you in to another integration, bringing "the reviews most relevant to you, without having to register, search for friends, or fill out a profile."

Opting in or out aside, the feature seems like a useful integration - who better, at times, then to get movie advice from than your friends? The second you show up on the site, you'll see top reviews from your friends, movie recommendations based on your Facebook interests, and recent activity of your friends on the site.

We guess that, if you're using Rotten Tomatoes to rate lots of porn videos and you're Facebook friends with your family, then maybe this is an issue for you. But realistically, what expectations of privacy did you have if you were logged into Rotten Tomatoes using your Facebook profile to review movies in the first place?

For those of you that continued on with Facebook's "Instant Personalization" features, this looks like a useful and benign enough implementation and we're looking forward to finding out what movies our friends like and dislike without having to search for them on yet another site.

Here is our interview, with questions derived from a number of the R/WW authors:

R/WW: In a general sense, do you think privacy is less important now than it used to be - due to the popularity of social networks and social software? Because it does seem that to achieve true personalization, some sacrifices need to be made in terms of privacy (note: we're not getting at Google here, but in terms of web technology it is a noticeable trend these days).

Sep: Even despite the current trends, it is incredibly important to design products with the utmost respect for user data and we do this in the following ways:

2. Transparency. For those users who opt in to the Web History product, we show them their previous queries, so that our users can see all the data that is used to personalize their search results.

3. Control. Our Web History users have the ability to pause Web History at any time, or go back and delete individual items.

4. Data Portability. Our Web History users can export their web history data to another service through an RSS feed.

R/WW: In May at the Google Personalization Workshop, you mentioned that Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person. How far away is a 'Personal PageRank' system for mainstream (Mom and Pop) people, who may not have a Google Account yet and are probably a long way off using iGoogle? Is an Account necessary, or can PageRank be personalized in other ways, without Mom and Pop even realizing it perhaps?

Sep: We have various levels of personalization. For those who are signed up for Web History, we have the deepest personalization, but even for those who are not signed up for Web History, we personalize your results based on what country you are searching from. As we move forward, personalization will continue to be a gradient; the more you share with Google, the more tailored your results will be.

To answer your question as to whether Mom and Pop would realize it, it's important for us to be transparent about what we're using to personalize your search results, and we will continue to strive towards that as we increase the levels of personalization in search.

R/WW: Does Google use the information gleaned from GMail to improve the targeting of search ads, or even the branding?

Sep: No, we don't use GMail for personalization of search or search ads.

R/WW: Is personalization really a problem in search? Doesn't the context of the query give the information that the search engine needs?

Sep: Peter Fleischer's article in the Financial Times gives a nice rundown of some examples of when personalization is useful. [Ed: Peter Fleischer is global privacy counsel for Google]

R/WW: A few people in the comments for this week's Read/WriteWeb poll mentioned that Google's personalized search ended up just giving them the same results over and over again, which wasn't helpful for them. In other words, they wanted to search for new things, not things they'd already found previously. This may explain why 9% of poll respondents say personalized search has given them worse results. Do you have any explanation or response to those people?

Sep: That's interesting feedback. Giving the user a diverse set of results for a query is important to us, and for this reason we have tended towards making the effects of personalization subtle. Most of the individual rankings changes that we do at Google (both in personalization and outside of personalization) have an effect that's not highly perceptible to our users as a large change.

In terms of the specific concern as to whether personalization would give them the same results repeatedly, this is a reasonable concern, which is why the majority of our algorithms aren't simply boosting those results that you've seen before, but rather taking into account things like your location and your interest in order to give results that are both relevant to your query and to you.

R/WW: Thank you Sep for the interview.

Note: photo is via Google Blogoscoped

Some see the remarks as evidence of Yahoo! throwing in the towel and admitting that Google has won the search wars. Asked to clarify his statement to the Times Online, Bhat said, "We're not admitting defeat. Search still matters, but we need to be providing a wrapper around search to turn the info search offers up into something more useful." So, what does that mean?

Both Google and Yahoo! are hoping to take data about user behavior aggregated from across their properties (think: search history, del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos, Upcoming events, Answers questions, etc.) in order to learn more about what each user wants. The ultimate goal is to deliver a more personalized experience to the user.

Privacy fears aside, if Google and Yahoo! are right, and personalization is where the web is headed, then Google might be more vulnerable than anyone thinks. According to Compete, the stickiest site on the web -- the one that demands most of our attention -- is MySpace, followed by Yahoo! and eBay. Google is actually 5th (based on February 2007 numbers). Facebook, which was 8th in February according to Compete, is likely to make a big push as their new platform adds more useful applications for users, giving them less of a reason to ever leave the site.

Why is attention important? Because the more time you have to interact with users, the more chance you have to gather information about them. The more information you have about them, the more useful and personalized you can make your service and the better you can target advertising and capture a users' ecommerce spending. If the web paradigm is indeed shifting from search to personalization, then it would appear that Yahoo! and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook might be in a better position to take advantage of that than Google.

What do you think? Is search dead? Is personalization the next big thing? Is this a tacit admission of defeat by Yahoo! or is it visionary foresight? Who is in the best position to dominate the personalized web?

In other news Google is ramping up its personalization efforts. Now when you're signed in to Google, you'll "have access to a personalized Google - one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage." Google's best-known blogger, Matt Cutts, mentions this in his latest post - as well as linking to external analysis on the personalization theme.

I actually came across it myself the other day, via Google Accounts. At the time I wasn't sure whether this message in the Google Accounts Help was new or not:

"What does it mean for Google to be more personalized with Google Accounts?

When you're signed in to Google Accounts, you'll now get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. For example, if you use Google Bookmarks or Google Search History, you'll get more targeted web search results and recommendations for videos or gadgets."

Although there's nothing spectacularly new in all this, it looks like Google is beginning to integrate its various personalization efforts more. Remember when we did a poll asking which "Search 2.0" approaches stand the best chance to beat Google? Well Personalized Search ended up getting the most votes! So looks like Google is covering the search 2.0 attack with a full court press.

Some analysts and reporters saw this as an admission of defeat by Yahoo! and the Times Online article which we quoted from ran under the headline: "Search is history, says Yahoo!." But, Yahoo! says that the Times reporter was a bit overzealous. They released the following statement to us to clarify Bhat's remarks:

"Web Search is a top priority for Yahoo! and we are committed to developing and investing in new technologies that will shape the future of search. We believe personalization tools complement our efforts in search and will play an important role in delivering the most relevant information to help consumers get a more complete answer and connect them to their passions, their communities and the world’s knowledge."

Our original post on this topic yesterday generated a lot of comments, mostly from people saying search will always be the dominant paradigm on the web and Yahoo! would be nuts to think otherwise (though some people agreed that personalization will play an ever increasing role in the battle for user attention). I'm going to reprint a comment that I made on the original post, which sums up my personal view of this issue.

"I don't think search is ever going to disappear, but I can see what Yahoo! and Google are both talking about when they say that personalizing your user experience is the next dominant paradigm on the web," I wrote yesterday. "It's no longer enough to go online and search for specific information, it's about getting specific information from trusted sources delivered to you (RSS, etc.), having new information you're interested in delivered to you (StumbleUpon, MyYahoo/Netvibes, etc.), having your email, banking, stock portfolio, address book, and other personal info all at your fingertips."

We mentioned yesterday that social networks like Facebook and MySpace, with their intimate user knowledge, and widget ecosystems that keep users on site, might be in a very good position to dominate a personalized web. Yahoo!, which owns some of the most popular content sites on the web (News, Sports, MyYahoo), is also seemingly well poised to take advantage of better personalization and command more user attention.

What do you think? Can a more personalized user experience help propel Yahoo! or some other site ahead of Google?

Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the glut of information on the Web circa 2009, personalization in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations. Ultimately personalization is about websites and services giving you what you want, when you want it. That's the long-standing dream anyway. Let's see if the products of 2009 are fulfilling it.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

All of the trends that we're profiling overlap. This is particularly so with personalization, as we'll see.

Filtering the Real-Time Firehose

Personalization is often used to provide an organization layer for users on top of real-time data. As Ken Fromm put it in his primer on the Real-Time Web:

"The Internet is shifting from discrete units of websites and Web pages to discrete units of information [...] organized in ways that are relevant and personal to each individual, using data gleaned from social graphs as well as recommendation and personalization services that allow users to set their preferences."

If you use a dashboard product like TweetDeck, Seesmic or Peoplebrowsr to use Twitter, then you're able to group people, keywords and topics. This is effectively personalization at work.

Open Web: More Data About You, Better Personalization

Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of open data on the Web. A lot of companies make their data available on the Web via APIs, web services, and open data standards. And as we discussed in the first post in this series, much of that data is structured - allowing it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties.

How does open data lead to personalization? Simply put, the more data about you and your social graph that is available to be used by applications, the better targeted the content and/or service will be to you. There are non-trivial privacy issues about this, however the personalization benefits can be significant.

There are a whole host of open data standards on the Web now. They include:

• Data portability - taking your data and friends from one site to another.
• OpenID - portable identity; single sign-on.
• OpenSocial - Google initiative for social networks, enabling developers to create widgets with one set of code; MySpace a member, Facebook isn't.
• APML - growing 'Attention' standard; Your Attention Data is all the information online about what you read, write, share and consume.

Recommendation Engines

Many consumer products on the Web aim to recommend you things that you may like. A couple of years ago, Alex Iskold outlined what he saw as the 4 main approaches to recommendations:

• Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior
• Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users
• Item recommendation - recommend things based on the item itself
• A combination of the three approaches above

Amazon is probably still the best example of recommendations on the Web, but an example of something new from 2009 was Netflix launching better personalization features in March. They included new taste preferences, allowing users to (for example) choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark. Other additions included a personalized homepage and a feature enabling users to mix and match genres.

Conclusion

Personalization has shown slow but steady progress in 2009. It hasn't been as wild a ride as Structured Data or Real-Time Web, but we consider personalization to be a key facet of the evolving Web.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009:

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

Image credit: davepatten

Here's a screengrab of the previous personalization offerings:

Groupon competitor Google Offers updated its personalization aspects just last month.

Will daily deals become more personalized? Tell us what you think in the comments.

This "patented prediction technology" will be incorporated into the search function, and its advertising and marketing.

Hunch launched in 2009 as a platform for recommending things that it believed its members would like based on what they shared online. It relaunched in 2010 as an Internet personalization service with a taste-graph driven recommendation engine that recommends highly targeted personal recommendations to its users based on 20 quick questions. Hunch is now officially a part of eBay, but will keep its New York-based office, and continue to operate as its own entity.

We mentioned in our Half-Year Web Technology Report that Google has impressed so far in 2007, on both the acquisition front and building up its own technology. Equally impressive is that Google is not sitting back and letting the hundreds of alternative search engines overtake them in technology. Often incumbent tech companies are content to sit on their market position and so they don't innovate much further. However Google has busily been experimenting with, and implementing into its main search properties, new types of personalization.

In January we ran a poll asking which "Search 2.0" approaches stood the best chance of beating Google. Personalized Search was the option that got the most votes. Also our interview with Google's Matt Cutts revealed that Google has been experimenting with personalization a lot over the past year or so.

Google Accounts Personalized

Back in February we noted that Google was ramping up its personalization efforts via Google Accounts. When you're signed in to Google Accounts, said the Google blog, you'll "have access to a personalized Google - one that combines personalized search results and a personalized homepage." Matt Cutts mentioned it in a post too and linked to external analysis on the personalization theme.

I had noticed it earlier, via Google Accounts. I'd spotted the following message in the Google Accounts Help:

"What does it mean for Google to be more personalized with Google Accounts?

When you're signed in to Google Accounts, you'll now get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. For example, if you use Google Bookmarks or Google Search History, you'll get more targeted web search results and recommendations for videos or gadgets."

So at that point Google was beginning to integrate its various personalization efforts more. Currently when you go to the Google Accounts frontpage, you are told that you can "customize pages, view recommendations, and get more relevant search results" when you login.

iGoogle, Localization, Gadget Maker

In May there was a Google Personalization Workshop, which gave more details of Google's push into personalization.

In the workshop the new name for Google Personalized Homepage was revealed - iGoogle. Also shown off at the workshop was Gadget Maker, location-based personalized search results and a “My Community” service for the iGoogle directory.

In regards to its personalized homepage, Google has always had far more gadgets available on its platform than live.com, Netvibes or Pageflakes. As of May there were over 25,000 different Google gadgets. Also according to Jessica Ewing at the May event, product manager of the Google Personalized Homepage program, iGoogle was the fastest growing product at Google in 2006.

Some useful background to Google's personalization efforts, from a Google Blogoscoped post in May:

"Why does Google invest in a “personal Google” now? Sep [Kamvar, from Google] says it’s because of recent trends in content on the web, and recent technological advances in search algorithms. He suggests that Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person, so to speak. Sep explains that Google thinks of personalization in 3 parts:

• Search Your own stuff (like Google Desktop Search, Web History)
• Traditional (Pull) Search
• Push Search (like recommendations, iGoogle/ personalized homepage)"

Privacy Concerns?

Google goes out of its way to ensure that the user is still "in charge" of the personalization experience, no doubt to keep the privacy hounds at bay. Apart from needing to be logged into your Google Account, Google also makes personalization optional - including giving the user the ability to pause the Web History feature or remove specific items from the history. Users can also export their Web History as an RSS feed, which is important given that the ability to export one's data has long been a key issue for 'open Web' advocates.

We'll take a closer look at privacy issues in one of our feature posts this week.

Conclusion

Google seems to be fighting a two-pronged battle with their personalization efforts - one is to keep themselves ahead of the alt search engine pack, and the other is to one-up Yahoo, Microsoft, Netvibes, Pageflakes and the other personalized start page contenders.

I still think Google has much to do in terms of innovation in search personalization - take a look at Collarity or Hakia as just two examples of alt search engines with innovative personalization approaches. But the Google Account (which is where much of this personalization in Google products is coming from) and the new iGoogle features show that Google is pushing forward in search innovation - certainly they are not resting on their considerable laurels!

Over the next 5 days we'll investigate Google's personalization efforts more. I hope you enjoy the Read/WriteWeb Files this week!

Prior to today's launch, the mobile versions of News360 lacked the login and personalization features on the tablet and the Web. But now Android and iPhone users can log in and view their personalized headlines while on the go.

CEO Roman Karachinsky calls News360's linguistic filtering a "'reverse search engine' approach." Users choose news topics and sources to follow and sign into their social Web services, and News360 reads the content there and learns what interests its users. It then queries the Web for stories that match and pulls them into the user's personalized feed. In a world of information overload, a news reading app this smart is a relief.

Semantic personalization is a tried-and-true method. Flipboard also uses semantic data for its recommendations. But News360 is a much broader reading experience, searching all the news on the Web for the stories that interest you. Plus, News360 has a Web version at news360.com, and with today's release, News360 has beaten Flipboard to mobile devices.

To learn more about how News360 works, check out our coverage of its 2.1 release in October, which goes into detail about the personalization process.

You can download the latest version for all devices (including Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry) from news360app.com.

Have you personalized your news reading with News360? Do you like its recommendations?