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

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We're posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. Our opening post was about Structured Data . In this article we look at probably the most hyped trend of 2009: the Real-Time Web . It has become a core part of many Internet products this year: Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google, Delicious, WordPress, and many others. 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! What is the Real-Time Web? Ken Fromm wrote an insightful primer to the Real-Time Web for ReadWriteWeb. In it he explained that the Real-Time Web is a new form of communication, it creates a new body of content, it's immediate, it's public and has an explicit social graph associated with it, and it carries an implicit model of federation. One of the early leaders in the Real-Time Web was FriendFeed , a lifestreaming service that became popular with early adopters. Co-founder Paul Buchheit (who also built the first version of Gmail, during his time at Google) told ReadWriteWeb in May that "the open, real-time discussions that occur on FriendFeed are going to become a major new communication medium on the same level as email, IM and blogging." Everything is Real-Time Now We must of course begin our product overview with Twitter . In March this year the super-trendy microblogging service marked its 3rd birthday. As Marshall Kirkpatrick explained at the time, it's really the story of Twitter as a platform that is most exciting. However the Real-Time Web is much more than Twitter. It has changed the products and strategies of almost every major Internet company in 2009 . Google may have missed the early action , but by May 2009 co-founder Larry Page was proclaiming that Google had to do a better job of being real-time. It's started that process. For example Google is behind a project called PubSubHubbub , which delivers RSS feeds much faster (near real-time). PubSubHubbub is already making Google Reader faster . But while you're waiting for Google search to become truly real-time, you can at least add Twitter results to it with this plug-in . In March, Facebook launched a site redesign emphasizing a real-time stream of updates on users' homepages. Although this was unpopular with users , Facebook continued to dabble in Real-Time. In June, Facebook announced a new search interface allowing users to search for content from people, organizations, and other public figures as soon as they share it on Facebook. This was described as "up-to-the-minute" search results - in other words a real-time search engine. Meanwhile in April, FriendFeed introduced a revamped user interface that focused much more on real-time updates than previously. The most impressive change was the new advanced filters, which made it a lot easier for users to create streams based on keywords, groups, sets of friends and more. FriendFeed's filters added something powerful to the Real-Time Web. In August, Facebook further strengthened its Real-Time chops by acquiring FriendFeed . This immediately brought more real-time sophistication into the Facebook family - we're yet to see how Facebook will use it though. In August Yahoo's influential social bookmarking service Delicious was re-born as a real-time news tracker . It launched a new home page, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter. The real-time updates continue... earlier today, all blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud . Conclusion In May, Marshall Kirkpatrick identified three forms of value from the Real-Time Web : ambiance, automation and emergence. In August, Bernard Lunn compared it to the real-time world of the trader . The Real-Time Web is all of those things and more. 2009 has in many ways been the Year of the Real-Time Web . But it's early days yet, because we - collectively - are still looking for ways to use all of that extra real-time data. We've made a lot of data real-time and surfaced it in search and our filters. But what new applications and intelligence can we build off this data? That question will be answered over the coming few years. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: The Real-Time Web

OneRiot , one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot's partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user's stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby , for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users' streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot's API, developers are free to use them in whatever way the see fit. Sponsor OneRiot's ad network, RiotWise, launched about 2 months ago as a closed beta with roughly 20 partners. The new RiotWise Trending Ads program was built on top of this network. The network will feature a mix of CPM and CPC ads. 2010: It's all About Monetizing the Real-Time Web As OneRiot's general manager Tobias Peggs told us earlier this month, "2010 will be all about monetizing the real-time Web." Real-time advertising, however, comes with its own set of challenges. While Google AdSense, for example, can take its time to learn about what works best for a certain keyword, advertising systems for the real-time web have to work with a different set of signals and react to an environment that is always in flux. In this context, it makes sense for OneRiot to launch a product that focuses on trending topics and not on trying to match an individual user's stream to the right advertiser. Initially, OneRiot will work closely with developers to ensure that the initial implementations of the RiotWise Trending Ads work well for users. For now, developers will have to get approval to use the new ads by applying through the OneRiot Developer Network . The company plans to roll out the program more aggressively in the next year. Discuss

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OneRiot Launches New Real-Time Ads to Monetize Trending Topics

Don't worry, it's not Twitter! For our Best LittleCo of 2009, we've chosen a small company whose product launched in 2009 and quickly became a leading example of one of the year's big trends: the real-time web. Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web. Last week we announced that Google was our choice for Best BigCo of 2009 , due to its product innovation in 2009. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company , as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers. Sponsor This is the 6th year we've done this and many of the small companies we choose each year go onto much bigger things. Here's a quick look back at previous winners: In 2008 we chose web office vendor Zoho as Best LittleCo and Brightkite as our Most Promising. Zoho is still competing well above its weight bracket against office software giants like Microsoft and Google. However it's fair to say that Brightkite hasn't delivered as much on its promise as we thought it might, due in part to the emergence of Foursquare as 'the next big thing' in mobile social networking. In 2007 Twitter was Best LittleCo and in a break from tradition we named "the open source movement" as most promising. Twitter, of course, has since gone on to make a huge impact on the Web and media. In 2006 YouTube was Best LittleCo and Sharpcast Most Promising. YouTube was acquired by Google in October of that year. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp , creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner Most Promising. Both went on to be acquired, by Yahoo! and Google respectively. Now let's find out who is ReadWriteWeb's Best LittleCo of 2009. Then on page 2 we name our Most Promising company for 2010. Best LittleCo of 2009: Aardvark Aardvark (our initial review and then a comparison review ) is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." The company was founded in 2007, but the product only launched in March 2009 at SXSW. It quickly became one of the companies we point to most when we discuss the Real-Time Web , one of the most significant trends of this year. In our report on the Real-Time Web released in November, we described how it works: "You can ask Aardvark any question, and it will try to find a person in your extended social circles who knows about that topic and is available to answer at that moment. Aardvark facilitates these conversations through a very polite IM bot, an iPhone app with push notifications, the company's website, Twitter or email. Instead of broadcasting your question to every one's stream of information, Aardvark delivers the question only to people who are relevant and available." Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered. As we noted in our report, Aardvark's got an all-star team of engineers from Google and Yahoo and high-profile investors. It's already cutting deals with major tech brands and is rumored to be on Google's acquisition list. Whatever happens to the company, the use cases for Aardvark are just beginning to be explored. In short, Aardvark impressed us a lot this year and it made no fewer than 3 of our 2009 best-of lists : Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 Aardvark's iPhone app was also popular with our writers, two of them putting it in their top 5 mobile web applications of the year . Next page: ReadWriteWeb's Most Promising Company for 2010... Most Promising: Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha launched in May and ended up making our list of the Top 10 Consumer Products of the year . It was also the most hyped, with the possible exception of Google Wave. Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer . But Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. It also enables users to compute and calculate things off that information. While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too - although not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. Wolfram|Alpha also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price. We listed some initial use cases for Wolfram|Alpha in July, but it's a safe bet to say that the best of this product will be seen in 2010 and beyond. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data, so we think it's a product to watch in 2010. Now let us know your thoughts on our picks for Best LittleCo (Aardvark) and Most Promising (Wolfram|Alpha). Discuss

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Best LittleCo of 2009 & Most Promising for 2010

With only one day until the Le Web Conference , ReadWriteWeb invited editor of ReadWriteFrance Fabrice Epelboin to share his thoughts on this year's theme - the real-time web. While many choose to focus on the negative aspects of real-time technologies including information overload, Epelboin offers a positive view of how the real-time web offers French netizens an effective tool for political commentary. Sponsor In a Facebook post marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, French President Nicolas Sarkozy claimed that he'd taken part in the event at Checkpoint Charlie on November 9, 1989. Nevertheless, according to Epelboin, after some fact checking, journalists discovered that the date of the event was unlikely to be true. In protest to what appears to be Sarkozy's effort to rewrite history, bloggers across the country got creative. Nicknamed, "Sarko on the Moon", real-time netizens tweeted their best rendition of the President Photoshopped into historic scenes. While a fun exercise in citizen-driven political satire, the campaign renewed criticism of Sarkozy. Many netizens have openly railed against the President for his aggressive enforcement methods. Most noticeably, Sarkozy enacted the internet policing agency HADOPI, an organization authorized to monitor innocent citizens for illegal downloading. For more on the real-time web, check out ReadWriteWeb's latest report Discuss

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ReadWriteFrance and the Power of Real-Time Political Commentary

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series , below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009. You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year. Sponsor This is the fifth in our series on top products of 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Top 10 International Web Products of 2009 Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users . A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That's a powerful cultural change. Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data - thanks to Twitter. Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it's overwhelming but the end result is an experience that brings the dispersed social web back together again. Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It's got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria - we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking. PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud ) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties - immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on. Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It's a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web. Tweetdeck (and Seesmic ) are the market's leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit , but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It's in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web. Honorable Mentions: Feedly Twingly Twitterfeed Public Radio Tuner Regator Collected.info Postrank just keeps getting smarter. This social media analytics service tracks distributed conversation regarding blogs and feeds and scores items based on the relative engagement of those conversations. The usefulness of this service just doesn't stop and the company's movement into large-publisher analytics and APIs this year should bode well for customers, developers and consumers. Postrank is the only service on this list that was also on 2008's list. ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn't be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week's announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset . The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that's changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that's so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO's research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have. Discuss

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Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

"Recommended." -HP Official News "Very thorough. Exceeded my expectations. Nice work." -Henry "Hank" Nothhaft, Jr. Entrepreneur-in-Residence at SRI "The report is excellent -- a great synthesis of why the real time web is different, what changes, what doesn't and what the industry needs in order to press forward." - John Borthwick CEO, Betaworks Those are just a few of the things that people have said about our newly released research report The Real-Time Web and its Future so far. Want to know what's included in the report? Check out the Table of Contents and the full text of the Introduction below. Sponsor RWWfinalTOC That's the Table of Contents and below is the full text of the introduction to the report. We hope you'll purchase this report via this link - and check out our package deals for purchasing the ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management as well! What is The Real-Time Web? Beyond Twitter and Facebook Dave Winer defines the real-time Web in four words: "It Happens Without Waiting."1 That's true, and appropriately vague. The phrase "real-time Web" means different things for different people and it's too early in the game to have anything but a loose, inclusive definition. Many of the different forms the real-time Web takes do have some common benefits, user experience elements, lessons learned, pitfalls and possibilities. This is what we explore in this report. It's definitely a whole lot more than just Twitter and Facebook, though these are the best known instances of what's referred to as the real-time Web. Someday Facebook may open up its user data and play a larger role in the real-time Web than just the introduction to the stream model that it plays today. Someday Twitter may grow, discover how to retain users and effectively encourage more than the small number of people who today create the vast majority of content on that service. Today engineers estimate that Twitter sees about 1 thousand messages published per second and between 5 and 10 million links shared per day, before de-duplication. That sounds like a lot, but the real-time Web as a whole is already much, much larger than Twitter. For infrastructure provider Kaazing, the real-time Web is using HTML5 Web Sockets technology to push live financial information to the Web browsers of banking customers that had always been limited to desktop applications for security reasons. For consumer web app Pip.io, the real-time Web is creating an XMPP-powered chat-like experience for users to communicate with friends around objects like a Google Map or a streaming Netflix video playing in the Pip.io web OS. For semantic recommendation company Evri, the real-time Web is the ebbing and flowing of traffic data on Wikipedia. That data points to hot topics that Evri needs to build topic pages to serve their publisher customers. For search engine OneRiot, the real-time Web is made up of the links people share on Twitter ...as well as Digg, Delicious and the click-streams of more than a million users who have opted-in to exposing what they see online through the OneRiot toolbar. For Q&A service Aardvark, the real-time Web is the people inside the social circle of a user who happens to be available online at a given moment and interested in the topic of a user's question. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs that now deliver updated content to any other application that subscribes to a PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud feed, immediately after that content is published. NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen says the real-time Web creates a sense of flow for users that's comparable to the way television holds our attention. Google's Brett Slatkin, developer of the PubSubHubbub real-time protocol, says the real-time Web is a foundation for efficient computing and use cases we can't yet even imagine. In writing this report we interviewed 50 people who work on technologies that power or leverage what they consider to be the real-time Web. Those people have had a very diverse array of experiences, but articulate a common story. It's a story of increased computational efficiency - and software that struggles to keep users from feeling overwhelmed. It's a story of radically new possibilities but strategies based on adding value in conjunction with more traditional, slower moving online resources. We hope you enjoy reading this overview of the emerging real-time Web. We believe this phenomenon is one that will play a major role in the Web and world of the future. The page-based model of destination sites, created by centralized expertise and navigated through authority-based search and clicking link by link is being transcended. We think this survey of current strategies and experiences to date will prove very useful in helping you effectively participate in and help build the future of the real-time Web. Discuss

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Introduction to The Real-Time Web and its Future