Posts Tagged ‘personalisation’

Recently, my good friend George, decided to part ways with his then girlfriend. Sad times. Unfortunately, when it became time to make it official, by severing the relationship on Facebook, the status change attracted very few comments.

Now this clearly isn’t because George is simply unpopular. Nothing could be further from the truth – George is a witty, charming and sexually attractive man. I would go on, but what happened in Munich, stays in Munich.

The reason that such a status updated attracted few comments was that Facebook has decided that George’s updates aren’t that important. It never appeared in my newsfeed, it simply slipped by without me ever reading it.

Back in June, I blogged about Eli Pariser’s talk on online filter bubbles and how Web 2.0’s attempt to personalise its content can lead to blinding us to what is going on in the rest of the world.

This is a good example of this – Facebook has decided that George’s Facebook updates aren’t that relevant to me, even though I would consider him one of my closest friends (as well as living with him!). So beware the online filter bubbles, Eli was right all along.

Eli Pariser recently gave an interesting talk at TED about the way the internet is becoming more and more personalised – filtering so we see more of the stuff we want to see, and less of the stuff we don’t. He argues this can be a bad thing as it means we don’t see the other side of the argument.

One of the most interesting statistics given in the talk is that Google use 57 different factors to personalise your results, including many used even when you’re not logged in. That really must make your job a whole lot more complex if you work in SEO ;).