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Τετάρτη 21 Αυγούστου 2013

For your eyes only: How the personalized Web is transforming our relationship with technology


spiderweb

Social media already adds a personal layer to our online experience, but next-generation Web services are tapping the power of the cloud and massive data sets to bring us a new level of personalization in recommendations and behavioral predictions.

Search plus your personal life

Unsurprisingly, Google is heavily invested in the move to personalization. Itannounced a significant step towards personalized search last week with a plan to begin sourcing information from Gmail, Calendar and Google+ for search results. This isn’t the first time that Google has taken its search engine personal, but the company is clearly trying to adjust our expectations for it.
For years, we’ve been conditioned to think of Google results as objective. The SEO industry was founded on the assumption of consistent search results. That’s not to say that marketing professionals can’t adjust to the new world of personalization, but it’s going to take a paradigm shift.
 For your eyes only: How the personalized Web is transforming our relationship with technology
Ironically enough, if you want to understand the future of Google, you need look no further than Google Now. For those who are embedded in the constellation of Google’s Web services, Google Now has a near-magical ability to anticipate the information you’ll need throughout a day. With it, Google has gone from simply organizing the world’s information to harnessing it.
The promise of Google Now is that its automated card interface gets out of the way for users, but it is emerging at a time when we are also concerned that Google may know too much about us. In recent weeks, Google has faced criticism over its privacy policies for a quote in a legal defense and allegations that it reported a user to the police for searching for “pressure cooker bombs”. Both of those situations turned out to be overblown, but the severity of the public response is indicative of the level of fear that is circulating at the moment.
Google’s grand experiment with Google Now has come to a head with the Moto X, which is designed to have deep personalization on both the external and internal levels. Writing about the device, Robert Scoble recently described the “freaky line” where an additional cost to privacy is required in order to provide deeper contextual and personalized features.
Scoble says he’s “in 100%” and living over the line. I, for one, am not quite ready to welcome our new erosion of privacy overlords.

Civilization of this content

Beyond search, the content space is seeing plenty of interest in personalized recommendations. Gravity is working with publishers and advertisers to build interest graphs of its readers. Its technology runs semantic analysis on the articles that users read across sites on its network in order to recommend content that fits with your interests.
Here’s an example of a sample Gravity interest graph for a “32 year old male from Los Angeles [who] likes surfing, travel and music” after he read several articles:
gravity interestgraph 520x427 For your eyes only: How the personalized Web is transforming our relationship with technology
The visualization of an individual’s interests is a fascinating thing.  Thankfully, Gravity CEO Amit Kapur reassured me in a recent interview that the company’s data, which is collected through cookies, is anonymized. Users can also opt outof the service if they choose.
Outbrain also provides personalized content recommendations, basing its suggestions on a combination of factors, such as popularity, contextual, behavioral and personal. The company recently became the unfortunate example for the importance of Web safety when it suffered a security breach at the hands of the Syrian Electronic Army that exposed its clients, including The Washington Post, Time and CNN.... [...]

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