
The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal - twapi
http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/11/third-wave-of-web-will-be-uniquely.html
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chc
People keep saying this. At every step in the evolution of any software
platform, the next step will have this amazing quality of being "personal."
Then the next step comes along, and it's something considerably less magical.

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joe_the_user
I know the "more and more personal" meme is getting more and more attention.

I "personally" think it's simplistic.

I tend to believe that one "next wave" will be users obtaining sufficient
tools to fend-off the efforts of merchants to deal with them on a super-
personal basis. I want to control what people know and what people don't know
about me.

I have a number of different interests - social, political, technical and
business. I like it when I can find something that it is well-tuned to one of
these. I dislike it, quite a lot actually, when I get information that is
tries to "bridge" these interests. Just as much, I don't want to have my
airline tickets, my digital camera or my laptop marketed to any of my personas
- it was the generically good at the lowest price (I'd suspect this is why a
reaction to insurance-rate based on browser use resonated with people
regardless of its truth).

I mean, historically, our modern capitalist society has evolved on the basis
of creating more roles that people enter and leave (That Max Weber-101 folks).
Job, friends and family were separated a while ago and most people would
prefer they remain separate (we're far enough along that no remembers jobs
passed from father to son but I'd assume it sucked). Indeed, I'd say there's a
big demand now for easy tools to keep family and job separate.

It should be remembered that the ubiquity of the web is going mean that the
new of "naive users" as a percentage of the total online population is only
going to be _decreasing_ from now or from a time soon in the future. Once
everyone is on a social networking site, they will only become more selective
about what they want from it.

