Despite having to build -part of a- personalization infrustructure for a major news organization, I always thought it was a terrible idea.

Humans are creatures of habit, so when you disrupt that by giving them too many choices, the overall experience can become much more frustrating and overwhelming. Additionally, it severely limits the business' "editorial" power when the user is essentially acting as their own editor.

Personalization is good for sites that don't depend much on editorial content (youtube, Facebook), but for the vast majority it's just a bad idea.

I think it's interesting to see the ways the predictions had some right in them.

- What doesn't run on Amazon these days?

- WoW is as profitable as ever.

- Mobile has gone through the roof (what percent of your traffic is mobile, eh?)

- Internet video has gone mainstream (I used have normal friends who would pay for cable, not anymore.)

- I'd forgotten there was a time when google didn't alter my search results for me specifically.

- And of course, China is taking over the web http://mashable.com/2011/10/18/mary-meeker-internet-trends-2...

Fun stuff.

Pretty funny how the ones that didn't hit big are the ones that are still hard to explain in 10 seconds. Attention economy and semantic web.

I agree regarding the semantic web, but i have three things to say regarding the "attention economy".

1) The attentional economy is more an observation about the state of the world than a "thing".

2) You can get free access to wifi at Boston's Logan airport in exchange for watching an ad (in fact i did just a couple of days ago)

3) Content creators are aware now more than ever that they're not competing solely with other people in their industries for attention. To that extent there is an effort to reach viewers/consumers/users on the users terms.

In short, i think it was incorrect to formulate the attentional economy as an actual thing with literal market places. The observations that've come out of it are still relevant and useful.

Maybe its still hard to explain exactly because they never hit it big.

I think going back in time and explaining social networking to an audience would be tougher than it sounds.

With regards to the semantic web, this was mentioned on hn a few days ago: http://mqtt.org/

It's pretty neat, and will allow all sorts of machines and devices to be connected to the web.

It certainly seems possible that in a few years Berners-Lee's vision could become a reality.

Might want to update the title to highlight that this article is from 2007. :)

Thanks! Just realized it.

Yeah I was reading this article and started to really get the feeling that it was written by a tech journalist who was a few years behind the times, then quickly realized that it was written in 2007. Interesting to see the sidelining of sites/services/platforms like Mechanical Turk and Second Life, with no real momentum behind any alternative in their respective arenas since that time.

Did he predict what was coming? A lot of it has to do with AI, and the organization of personalized information. How long will it take for this arena to flourish?

2nd Life caught my eye - as did the absence of many winners since then. :-)

1. Semantic web. Not really. People are still trying, but it's not at all clear whether it will actually take off some day.

2. Artificial Intelligence. Not too long ago I would have said "Nope, keep dreaming". But recently there's been several AI-powered applications and projects that are actually useful. There's of course Siri, but also a whole bunch of Computational Linguistics and Computer Vision projects going on. I doubt we'll get an actual scifi-like "talking computer with personality" soon, but AI is more than just that.

3. Virtual Worlds. Well there is World of Warcraft, but I'm kind of glad 2nd Life didn't take off. It was much too bright and shiny to become a Snow Crash Metaverse ;-)

4. Mobile. Yup. Spot on.

5. Attention Economy. I'm not really sure what this is. I suppose that's a no then, even though parts of it seem to be implemented, it's not as ubiquitous as to be a "thing", or trend.

6. Web Sites as Web Services. Yes and No. We've seen quite a lot of these, and I like them a lot, but they never seem to be able to stay "just" a Web Service. Always expanding, not content to remain a single cog in a user-ducttaped web. Twitter is a good example of starting out as a brilliantly simple Web Service, expanding and doing so much more than "Do One Thing And Do It Well".

7. Online Video. Absolutely. Funny how they don't even mention YouTube :)

8. Rich Internet Apps. Yes. Although not on AIR or any other platform, but HTML5 and increasingly powerful JavaScript. There's successes and failures, some things work as Internet apps, some don't, some things need to be re-implemented a few times before someone gets them "right". But on the whole, this has been rising and probably will continue to do so for a while.

9. International Web. I don't know. I'm not seeing it. The big languages are still very isolated in my experience. I can't read Russian or Chinese so I don't know what's going on there. I can read Dutch, some German and a tiny bit of French, and when I do, it really feels to me as if they're on their own web, with their own web culture, style and sometimes even their own technologies. It seems that "everybody" is on the English web, but not vice versa.

10. Personalization. Yes. They try. It's interesting how most consumers never asked for this, and some of them really don't even want it, yet the marketing and advertising opportunities provide a strong enough force to push it any way. I'm not sure where this will end up going but they did get the prediction right.

So that's about 6 out of 10, maybe?

I think this tells us more about the feasibility of making these predictions at all, than whether RWW had a good grasp on the playing field in 2007. I remember 2007 and from that point of view, given this blast-from-the-past, indeed all of these technologies would have sounded just as reasonable as the rest.

> Funny how they don't even mention YouTube :)

"In October 2006 Google acquired the hottest online video property on the planet, YouTube."

I largely agree with the rest of your assessment though.

Whoops, seems I completely glossed over that ;-) Thanks for the catch!