The Rise of the Personal Web

The last couple of years have undeniably been a huge change to making the web more social. If I look around me to my family and friends, then most of them are active on the web in a number of ways. Some have a personal blog or website where they share information, are present on news websites, read RSS feeds and most of all have an account on multiple social networks. These days, everyone is online and shares information about their lives, interesting content they find and so on.

The essence of the internet is still as it was 20 years ago: a linked network of information. Lots of information! The amount of data present on the web and its continuous growth makes it more and more difficult to find all the relevant bits and pieces that are interesting to you. Making the web more social has already made it a little bit easier to manage this information overflow, but there is still too many signal noise in the information feed the web is bombarding us with all the time.

There are already great tools both offline and online to better streamline that information, but it’s not at all perfect yet. If I look at my personal setup, I have a personal Gmail account, multiple other Gmail accounts for work related emails, Facebook for checking stuff my friends share and messaging, Twitter for following like minded people, Google Reader to keep up with the news from 124 blogs in tech, social media, gaming, science, astronomy, programming, …, http://www.reddit.com for more news, Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/) for even more news, YouTube for entertainment, Linked.in for managing business contacts, etc…

This immediately shows that while it becomes easier to find information, it becomes a hell to manage it all. We need better ways to filter, deduplicate and prioritize all this information, targeted to my own persona.

The Personal Web will evolve around three major pillars, your friends, your location and your interests. Relevancy of all that content will be measured among the same three pillars.

On social networks like Facebook and Twitter not all content is always relevant to me. Pure social content like photos of my friends’ last trips, status updates about what they’re doing will be relevant to me based on how relevant my friendship is with them. Content sharing of YouTube videos, news articles, blog posts will on the other hand mostly be relevant if the content itself matches my personal interests. The same is true for location content.

What restaurant should I go to this weekend? Again, a combination of what the hottest restaurants are in a specific location together with what places my friends frequently visit and like, combined with my personal preference of eating could give my a quite accurate list of places to visit. The same can of course be applied to bars, events, shops, museums, city highlights, …

What is happening online that I like? Google Reader makes life a bit easier for keeping up to date what happens on a number of sites, but there is still too many noise and double content I need to go through every day. Again, adding relevance to this stream primarily based on my interests, intermixed with what my friends cross network are sharing right now and my current location could filter or prioritize this stream more intelligently.

The personal web is all about making that huge amount of information on the web personal again. Ideally I would have one interface (can be the browser itself or some website) where I can sift through all the content that is interesting and relevant to me.

There are already some successes in this field as for example Amazon. They do a great job in trying to understand what products might be interesting to you based on previous purchases. Others are for instance the Facebook news feed, Google Reader “sort by magic”, http://www.jinni.com/ for movies, etc

Companies like Google and Facebook will more and more merge into a similar model concerning content relevancy. Where Google used to be all about the content, they are more and more integrating social and local relevancy. Facebook is still not used that often as a search engine, but they will become bigger in that area in the next years. This makes a lot of sense, if you look at the new Open Graph api and the “like” system taking over the net.

Personally I am really looking forward to all the new technologies and startups that will be active in this field and hope that somewhere in 2011 I will have finally found the one application that I popup everyday to read my personal “manageable” web feed.

The Internet of Things

Great video on the future of "things", how everything will someday be fully interconnected, aware of each other and react on each other to make the world a better and mostly smarter place. For More information check out A Smarter Planet Blog

Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself - natural systems, human systems, physical objects - have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didnt used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And its all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.

Look at that complex set of relationships among all of these complex systems. If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. Thats where societies become more efficient, thats where more innovation is sparked.

When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.

via youtube.com