Today the daily deals giant acquired Adku, which describes itself as an "early stage startup working on big data for e-commerce" with the goal of giving users "a more personalized experience." Adku focuses specifically on e-commerce sites.

Ever since its public offering last November, Groupon has been working on personalizing its services. It acquired social shopping start-up Mertado earlier this year. Similar to Adku, Mertado's goal is to create shopping experiences that "build bridges between content, commerce and community." Adku focuses on bigger ecommerce sites; Mertado is more focused on home-related products.

Groupon isn't the only daily deals company that is working on personalization. Competitors Google Offers and Amazon Local are also trying to figure out what its users want the most.

San Francisco-based Adku was founded in 2010 by former Google employees.

A new iPad app called Groovebug just launched. It uses your iTunes music collection to create "an iPad magazine tailored to your musical tastes." The familiarities to Flipboard seem a little forced. You do use the swiping motion to go from one page to another but, outside of that, it doesn't feel much like a magazine experience. Also, Flipboard is more sophisticated about how it embeds external content. Although I did like how Groovebug embeds YouTube videos.

That's not to say that Groovebug doesn't have a lot of potential. I think they're onto something in regards to bringing the Flipboard experience to music. The personalized (through your iTunes) aggregation is a good start, but I'd like Groovebug to help me discover more music and media content about music too.

I really like the concept of Groovebug, as explained in the company's press release:

"There is incredible access to artists now through all of these yet lack the cohesive experience of the past (sitting with album art and packaging and reading liner note, looking at photos, reading their thank you lists, seeing where it was recorded and how, etc). Groovebug offers a unique flip through of all things related to an artist in simple swipes of the iPad eliminating the need to go search several sites or possibly missing information by skipping a crucial site."

Indeed, there is a great opportunity for someone to create a cohesive album-like Internet experience. Musicians such as Arcade Fire and more recently Bjork have come up with artist-focused creative solutions. But there's room for a media app like Groovebug to offer a solution that's based around the user's needs - rather than the artist.

That's what Groovebug aims to do. "Personalization is one of our guiding principals," according to Groovebug co-founder and CEO Jeremiah Seraphine.

Groovebug hasn't quite nailed it yet, but I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

Netflix is certainly aware of that problem, and according to an FAQ posted on its Investor Relations page, it's looking at a number of tweaks to its offerings in order to make its streaming service work better for households - and for households' individual members.

More recently, as streaming has become central to our business, we believe there may be an opportunity to change our focus from a household relationship to an individual relationship, since streaming is viewed on personal devices, such as phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions.

More Streaming Options?

That move from the household-centered TV to individual's mobile devices may require other changes as well. Currently Netflix only allows customers who sign up for the streaming-only plan to stream one movie at a time. Similarly, those who get one DVD a month and have unlimited streaming area also restricted to one stream. You can stream more than one movie at a time if you pay for the higher price packages.

But Netflix alludes in its Investors Relations FAQ that it's looking to change these options, something that will become increasingly necessary as the company focuses more on streaming and less on DVD rentals. "Our $7.99-per-month plan is for one stream at a time, and later this year we expect to be able to offer consumers some account options to watch multiple simultaneous streams."

Having a tiered streaming-only plan would make that option more viable for households, so that someone could watch Man v Food on their Xbox (for example) and not shut others out from watching iCarly on the iPad.

A recognition that consumers are watching videos on different devices this way might also prompt Netflix to make better use of individual profiles, even if under the umbrella of one master household account.

Would you pay more to have access to multiple streams on Netflix?

Not everyone sees it that way, though - especially among the aggregated. Yesterday the popular but new iPad app Zite, which calls itself a Personalized Magazine, got a nasty Cease and Desist letter from 10 big media companies very unhappy with the way their original content was being aggregated. The companies said Zite is manipulating their content without their permission and stripping out the ads. Zite says it's respecting what's communicated in the code on pages it indexes and that it's willing to change on request. The tone of the industry letter is so noxious that I was immediately sympathetic towards Zite, but looking at the details and talking to the CEO of competitor Flipboard makes me think maybe this trailblazing startup took things a little further than it should have. I don't know, I'd like to know your opinion.

When you download Zite to your iPad, you can let it learn about what topics you're interested in from your Twitter, Google Reader or Delicious data. The app then creates a magazine-like interface for you to scroll through stories from a wide variety of sources online about those topics. You can give very specific feedback about what you like or don't like and then you get more stories like that. It's like Pandora for news articles. Not a lot of control but smart personalized learning. We reviewed the app in more detail yesterday and said that if you like Flipboard (Apple's iPad App of the Year) then you should try Zite because it's even easier to use.

What the Lawyers Say

Yesterday Zite received a Cease and Desist letter signed by ten lawyers from big, big media companies: Time, The Washington Post, McClatchy, E.W. Scripps, Getty Images, National Geographic, Gannett, Dow Jones, Advanced Publications and the Associated Press.

Here are a few excerpts from that letter:

"By systematically reformatting, republishing and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale without our permission in your iPad application, Zite directly and adversely impacts our businesses. Your application takes the intelletual property of our companies, as well as the hard and sometimes dangerous work of tens of thousands of people. It depreives our websites of traffic and advertising revenue. We do not know your intentions, but your actions harm our companies and the broader media and news industry on which your application relies for its content...

"The Zite application is plainly unlawful. Among other things, it intentially and pervasively infringes on our copyrights by reformatting and republishing substantial portions (and in many cases, the entirety) of our articles and large-scale reproductions of our photographs and illustrations. Further, it misappropriates and infringes our trademarks and falsely implies our affiliateion by prominently featuring certain of our logos on your home screen. Zite uses our content for commercial purposes in a manner that the law prohibits absent agreemnts with each of us. We demand that you immediately cease and desist all such infringing use of our intellectual property, both copyright and trademark, in or in connection with the Zite iPad application.

"We encourage and support the development of new technologies that facilitate innovative uses of our content - but those uses must be subject to our advance consent."

Emphasis on that last line was added by me - it so incredibly misses the point, I think. Technology innovations don't ask permission of the incumbents first. If they did, they would never be born.

That's my take on it, at least. Not everyone would agree with that, though.

What Flipboard Says

"Publishers are justifiably concerned with anyone showing entire articles minus ads," Flipboard CEO and Twitter Board of Directors member Mike McCue told me last night via Twitter when I asked for his opinion about the Zite C&D. Flipboard looks from the outside a lot like Zite does but is a bigger, better known startup.

"Better to partner with them and explore together. We've only displayed what publishers syndicate via RSS (including their ads, related links, etc). Sometimes full articles are used in RSS and sometimes it's just 1 line of text. We always respect that...True you can't partner with everyone. The best strategy is to ask 'would a publisher be happy with how we are displaying their content?'"

Hopefully McCue is right and publishers are generally supportive of the way his company aggregates content. Flipboard is also much better funded and better known than Zite, a smaller company and easier target.

What Zite Says

What does Zite have to say for itself? For context, I asked the company if it respected partial vs. full RSS feeds. It turns out Zite doesn't look at feeds at all. Ali Davar, CEO of Zite, offers the following:

We acquire our data via a web crawl rather than via RSS, so we do not currently take it into consideration. We already take steps to discern automatically what the publisher wishes in this regard (looking for a NO_ARCHIVE tag which indicates that they do not want search engines to serve up cached content), and we will look into using RSS as another potential clue in this regard.

First, some insight into how Zite works with content:

• Zite's content comes from a web crawl, the same way content is aggregated in the indexes of search engines like Google and Bing.
• Zite displays articles in reading mode, which changes how the page is rendered. Though we understand this can alter the layout and potentially eliminate ads, we made this design decision in order to give users a better reading experience. Reading mode is already common, e.g. Safari's Reader.
• We respect the decision of publishers who either use the noarchive metatag or explicitly tell us they want their content displayed in web mode - in either case, we render articles without reformatting.

We don't look at this as an adversarial situation. If the formal cease and desist we received from the big publishing companies yesterday was a one line email from the world's smallest blogger, we would treat it exactly the same: we would switch the content from reading mode to web view mode. That's it. This is not our legal position, it's just our policy. Zite is eager to work with publishers in a way that benefits everyone - most importantly end users.

It's good to know that Zite doesn't look at this as an adversarial question, but the lawyers who sent the letters sure seem to. Is Zite's approach fair? Will it satisfy publishers? Is it disingenuous for Zite to say what it is doing is comparable to search engines serving up cached content? Caches aren't intended primarily as methods of consumption - but Zite's copies are. Zite CEO Ali Davar is Canadian, and he deserves points for that, but I don't think I buy the NO ARCHIVE argument. The user experience argument, though, is more compelling.

Are publishers shooting the future in the foot by objecting? Maybe they should applaud any technology that helps them grow their audience, that people love to use to read their content, even if some percentage of them don't see the ads.

What do you think, readers?

"People don't want something targeted to the whole world--they want something that reflects what they want to see and know," Sandberg said at publisher Arianna Huffington's Advertising Week event today. So much for all the news that's fit to print - Sandberg's vision of the future sounds more like all the news that's relevant to your taste profile and social graph. Is that emphasis on personalization, which Facebook is better suited to power than any other company in history, a good or bad thing for media and the democracy it ought to fuel?

Your News is Good News

If the Facebook vision of "instant personalization" comes true, media websites and applications will emphasize content that was already shared by your Facebook friends, similar to other content that you yourself have shared on Facebook, or similar to other content that friends have shared. Available content might be privileged because it was published with keywords that appear on your Facebook profile.

The point is - you'll be shown first and foremost content on topics that you have expressed an interest in already, which is described in the same ways you describe your interests and that is deemed valid by people you trust.

The upside? A deep dive into specialized news and analysis, on the topics that are most important to you, will be easier to discover than ever before.

A personalized news service would recognize that those readers have subscribed to that source, that the source delivered that story from that website, whether a reader clicked through the link when they saw it and whether they shared it again with their friends. The more of those conditions that are true, the more likely a super-wonky GPS article will be to appear in their news experience later.

That's fantastic: a new level of subject-level sophistication, detail and efficiency will be available to a wider variety of people than ever before. Reading the news no longer means opening the local newspaper and seeing the lowest-common denominator news that the largest number of people will likely find palatable.

Personalized Media is Bad for the Soul

The other side of the coin is perhaps more familiar: the argument that personalization is an information silo. It leads to self re-enforcing political perspectives, unchecked extremism, a shortage of empathy, stunted learning about the world and a weak democracy.

A personalized media experience might be good for exposure to long-tail content, but it might also be bad for it.

There's something about a highly personalized stream that feels contrary to the public square feeling of a democracy.

Personalized recommendations have long been the holy grail of advertising and commerce, but learning, discourse and media have different goals in mind - don't they? In theory, media is about expanding our horizons more than maximizing conversion rate.

But perhaps media organizations will find a good balance of personalization and general interest content. That might be ideal from a media consumer's perspective, but for publishers enjoying a newfound ability to squeeze more and more pageviews and advertising dollars out of a customer's interest profile - why stop short of 100% personalization?

What do you think about the prospect of extensive media personalization? Do you think it's as likely as Sandberg and Facebook do? Do you think it's likely to be a net positive or negative for those of us on the receiving end? How do you think it might be done well - without coming at too high a price in terms of intellectual narrowing?

Now is a good time to consider these questions, because the era of all the news the algorithm calculates you'll like is very fast approaching.

Hunch co-founder and Chief Product Office Caterina Fake told Wired in a recent profile that "the ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person."

Why Hunch Exists

The so-called Web 2.0 era of the Web was based on user-generated content and social networking around that. Services like YouTube, MySpace and Flickr (which was co-founded by Caterina Fake) were the success stories of that era.

But now, in 2010, there is too much user-generated content to manually process. What's more, social networking is practically dominated by one company: Facebook. We no longer rely so much on niche sites like Flickr, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon to connect to other people socially. Another aspect to consider is that there's a lot of new data streaming in from sensors, RFID tags and other Internet-connected objects.

The upshot is that we need web services that can help us process all of this data and connect us to the parts that are personally relevant to us.

Opportunities For Startups

The refreshing thing is that these trends are opening up huge opportunities for startups.

GetGlue is another example of a startup aiming to match social data to objects or media. It knows for example that I recently watched Inception and (mostly) liked it. GetGlue can use that piece of data about me, look at my history of other movie likes, connect that to the movie history and preferences that it knows about other people who liked Inception. Ultimately all of that social and 'like' data can be used by GetGlue to recommend other movies to me that I may like to see.

We're early in this era, but both Hunch and GetGlue are busy building up extensive databases about people and what they like (their "taste" data). Not only that, they're slowly perfecting recommendation engines that process this data - ultimately filtering, structuring and personalizing it.

Let us know what other 'beyond social' startups have caught your eye recently.

We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

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!

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

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

We've now compiled the main points into a single presentation, available on Slideshare and embedded below. You can view the presentation in full screen by clicking the "full" button at the bottom of the presentation. You can also download the presentation as a Powerpoint file. All of the links in the presentation are clickable, should you wish to explore a certain topic more.

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

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

DailyPerfect hails from Estonia and is an incubator project of investment company Ambient Sound Investments (ASI), who we interviewed earlier this week on ReadWriteStart. DailyPerfect uses behavioral targeting to try and predict a user's interests, through what the company says is "an automated semantic analysis of publicly available information on the web." The company is also releasing an API.

Does it Work?

When you first enter the site, you're asked to enter your name into a textbox. Then you sit back and wait for the personalized news to come rolling in, based on your 'digital footprint.'

The topics that DailyPerfect thought I would like initially were a motley bunch. Some were correct, like 'web 2.0' and 'alternative music.' Some were broad enough to have little chance of not being correct, such as 'History' and 'Fiction.' But there were also some perplexing topics presented to me: for example 'Mining' and 'Benelux countries' (Belgium, Luxembourg or The Netherlands). However the site offers the familiar thumbs up or down beside each option, so you can train the system. The thumbs also apply to individual stories.

There are also options to follow people and websites, which is useful in this age of Twitter and blogging. With websites, you can import your OPML file of websites you subscribe to in your RSS Reader of choice. I entered my Google Reader OPML file, however it only seemed to include a random selection of my feeds.

The site is well designed and the stories were fairly relevant to me. However we can safely say that it's no Techmeme challenger. For one thing it doesn't bind the same story from different sources together, which may be Techmeme's enduring killer feature. Anyone can scan Techmeme and quickly find out what the trending stories are, and what sources either originated it or are the most popular links.

DailyPerfect, on the other hand, appears to select just one source for each story - and it's a mystery how that is done. I saw a few links each to Telegraph, Reuters, and Macworld; along with links to a smattering of blogs, including one ReadWriteWeb story. There was even a Techmeme link in there.

Conclusion: Not Perfect, Maybe Useful

I'm unconvinced by the claims of personalization, semantic analysis and other technical fandangery that DailyPerfect made in its PR. Many new web apps make these same claims, but the proof is in the pudding - and as of now I don't see anything particularly special about the content served up by DailyPerfect.

I can't honestly see myself continuing to use DailyPerfect. It's likely to join the long list of web apps I've tried once and then never came back to. Admittedly, that's probably because I'm an information hound that looks for (and needs, for my work) context in my daily news fix. DailyPerfect may well suit casual news readers who don't require a wide choice of news, but simply a well-picked selection of stories. The question is whether those types of readers want an automated solution like DailyPerfect (other options include the well-established Topix, or a site like PopURLs), or whether they want the human curation touch that aggregator news sites like Huffington Post and CNET offer.

News aggregation and filtering is a crowded field, and DailyPerfect is going to need to do more than throw around words like "personalization," "semantic," and "predictive" if they're to survive and thrive.

New Features: Taste Preferences, Personalized Homepages, Mix and Match Genres

Movie recommendations on Netflix, which are currently mostly based on your movie ratings, are one of the service's best features, and judging from what we have seen so far, the new taste preferences, which allow you to choose between movies that are romantic, suspenseful, or dark, for example, will make this experience only better.

The mix and match feature, too, will allow users to create a more personalized experience on the site, which is clearly the focus of today's update.

Netflix is rolling out these new updates to its over 10 million subscribers slowly, but Todd Yellin, Neflix's Director of Product Management, expects that all members will see them on their homepages within the next week.

Last night, Cooliris released a new set of features for its users. And while the functionality is interesting, the most compelling part of the release may the part they didn't mention: one of the new features may hold the key to a revenue stream for the company.

But for as simple as it sounds, it's the background image customization that holds the additional revenue potential for Cooliris - advertising revenue, but revenue nonetheless.

Click on the Cooliris "Discover" option, select "Sci-Tech," and you'll be greeted by a number of interesting photos sitting on a backdrop that advertises "Gears of War 2." The ad is obvious and yet unobtrusive. Within the photo stream, you'll also find images from the game that are paid placement ads.

Will a new ad unit in a rapidly softening ad market be the key to survival? Not likely. But it's a step in the right direction. And one thing is for sure: some revenue is always better than no revenue. Plus, it's safe to assume that this is only one of many ideas that Shashi Seth - the former head of YouTube monetization who joined Cooliris as Chief Revenue Officer in June - has up his sleeve.

If you haven't seen Cooliris yet, it's definitely worth spending a few minutes to experience it. Its visual landscape truly changes the photo browsing experience. In fact, for some, Cooliris is so compelling that it's the first thing they show non-technical folks for "Wow!" factor. To see it for yourself, visit CoolIris.

You've seen this done with church signs and parking tickets, but check out this particular manifestation of the personalization meme. I'm guessing that many of you will want to send it to friends and family. Hopefully at least 51% of you.

Feel the self-blame (and get some good laughs) via the MoveOn.org home page. Thanks to RWW team member Dionne Fox for finding this. I can only imagine what the Republican equivalent would look like.

The main feature of this new search interface - the ability to reorder search results at will - is decisively different from the rumors about a digg-style Google interface that tend to reappear regularly. In U Rank, your changes only appear to your friends and don't influence the overall search index.

The emphasis of U Rank is on collaboration and sharing. U Rank keeps a history of all your searches, but these are not shared by default. U Rank also allows you to create lists of search results by allowing you to copy a given search result to another search. You could, for example, create a list of personalized search results for a search term like "Best Digital Camera."

Definitely Still a Prototype

U Rank is clearly still a prototype. Search results take a long time to load, and some very basic user interface issues clearly still need to be worked out. There is, for example, no way to move a search result from the second search page to the first, and the interface for dragging and dropping items sometimes doesn't work well. To be really useful, it would also be helpful if you could organize your friends into groups, so that you can share your searches on lists more selectively.

However, this is also a very interesting experiment that takes search into a different direction by putting a lot of emphasis on social interaction. If your searches tend to be very broad, you would probably have to have a lot of friends to ever encounter an annotated or reordered result, but we can see how this new interface could be very useful if you are working in a team that is focused on a very specific topic.