This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data , our second about The Real-Time Web . The third part of our series is on Personalization . 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. Sponsor 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: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Image credit: davepatten Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Personalization

Google amazed us last week with 5 fantastic demos of innovations like Google Goggles and near instant speech-to-text mobile translation. That was before the company showed off its new real-time search , a key problem it solved with grace while its competitors floundered . Now we're told of a whole new batch of far-out search innovations that are in the works, in an interview with Google's vice-president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer in today's UK Telegraph . What are they? Translated search, social/personalized search and intuitive search . Here's what Mayer has to say about these three projects. Sponsor Translated Search See also: Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years "Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world's websites," Mayer told the Telegraph. "And then invoked the translation software a second and third time - to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through." That sounds like a great way to move beyond an internet dominated entirely by English, or to help English-only speakers cope with an internet dominated by content in other languages. It could help open up monetization to more content and it could greatly expand all our horizons. To think that a significant portion of the world's information is inaccessible because of something as almost-solvable as language differences seems like a real shame. Related: Google Announces New Translator Gadget for Website Owners Social Search and Personalization "Although we search the web right now, what we really want to do is search it as each individual user sees the web. We want Google to be the most accurate reference tool which allows people to search the web and each have an individual experience," Mayer told the Telegraph. The Telegraph's Emma Barnett identifies social network friend connections as a key part of this. "Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users' privacy settings are 'public'," the reporter writes. "According to Mayer - the ideal will be to get access to your friend's updates in search." Mayer: "Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public - will really empower us in terms of search." Understanding the structure and permission is one thing but getting access to Facebook's social graph would be another. Have you noticed that Google doesn't leverage Facebook Connect anywhere in any of its products? So far the company's experiments with social search have been impressive if small in scope. Now that Facebook is opening up, if Google can connect with it then hundreds of millions of people could have social search placed front and center in their search experience. But if connecting Google and your Facebook social graph was a simple matter, it probably would have already happened. Microsoft, meanwhile, is a big investor in Facebook and may seek to do something similar with Bing. See also: Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs Intuitive Search Recommendation technology is something we've written about extensively here and Mayer seems to be telling the Telegraph that recommendation is going to be a big part of Google's future. Intuitive search sounds pretty far-out, but Barnett writes that it may be closer than we think. Barnett: "The ultimate prize for Mayer is intuitive search. She wants Google to be capable of presenting information to users before they even know what they're looking for. Amazingly she doesn't think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the 'omnivorous' search engine -i.e. one which is able to take a user's total context - where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on." Mayer: "You could have some information waiting for you when you turn on your computer or some relevant URLs forming part of your browser background (presumably if you use Chrome - Google's browser) or on your side wiki". Our take: This sounds cool but shouldn't be too surprising. Last week Google demoed a mobile search product that automatically recommends categories you might want to search for and gives you a way to find nearby restaurants, etc. with a single click. Search engines have long struggled with the limitations of human users and their abilities to explain what they want. Search queries are maddeningly short and compared to many of the other signals we emit implicitly - like location, click-stream history and more - explicit search queries are relatively rare. The future of search may very well be in semi or unprompted recommendations based largely on our implicit behavioral data. That sounds like the movie Minority Report, but it's also the direction that search companies are moving in. You didn't think Google was going to leave a Minority Report type future untouched, did you? Check out Barnett's full coverage in the Telegraph at 'An omnivorous Google is coming' . Discuss

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3 New Forms of Search That Google is Working on Now