The Future of the Web
The internet can be broken into three main phases, and we're currently entering the last stage as personal identities transition to internet properties.
(1995-2004) Dissipated Node's: The web as we know it, was formed in the mid-nineties around personal content creation. Businesses didn't have websites, E-commerce didn't exist, and the internet was a raw universe. This gave way to the rise of web publishing properties such as Geocities that gave anybody the power to publish content to the internet, and each page become a node that was connected by links. A page with no links theoretically didn't exist on the internet because it wasn't linked within the web, and was thus an invisible node that couldn't be found. Poorly built search engines from Yahoo!, Lycos, and Excite struggled to properly index the web's contents, and it wasn't until Larry Page developed the PageRank algorithm while at Stanford to properly rank webpage results based around keywords.
(2004-2010) Knowledge Aggregators: As search engines advanced, content began to be grouped around topics and interests. Business/Ecommerce websites emerged, and personal content was still created but became very clustered into what I like to call a knowledge aggregator. Wikipedia and Yelp are perfect examples of content that was once distributed through the internet, and became consolidated in a human-powered cluster of content around specific interest groups. User-generated content became increasingly efficient as it became grouped human knowledge under umbrella domains that allowed the information to be easily indexed and searchable. A network that was once evenly distributed, began to slowly cleave and form several separated clusters.
(2010-2020) The Influence of Personal Nodes: Although the internet has become an efficient resource of information, the node schema is inherently equal for everyone within a physical boundary. Every internet user within the United States will have the same results on any indexable result of information (i.e. Yelp, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, etc). There is no reason for a young tech-savvy male California resident like myself to be accessing the same network of information as a elderly female on the east coast. Such polar opposite identities will have little overlap in the questions we are asking and the information we are seeking, and thus should not be given equal access to the internet's web of information.
We have just begun to touch the surface of the internet's personalization as machine learning and cloud computing power have advanced to levels that can give way to infinite permutations of the web. The internet's network of links has always had a single permutation that is uniform for every user, but will soon see billions permutations and soon every user will have a their own version of the internet. The same nodes will always exist for every user, but the links to reach such nodes will be customized and rerouted for each individual. Presently, someone looking to book a hotel in Las Vegas would visit a travel website such as Priceline.com. Each and every user, regardless of their gender, age, physical location, salary, and marital status would find the exact same version of the website and would enter their desirable hotel criteria such as price range, star rating, and included amenities. Such a search is very inefficient and cumbersome when you realize every user is accessing the same version of the website. The fundamental shifting and personalization of links for each user is formed around the addition of one's personal node.
Our identities are now online and develop and advance each time we add information to this growing cluster of personal information in the forms of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Hunch, and Twitter. Although our identity is not aggregated like general knowledge is now clustered, it will soon be used to form our own link structure to the internet's billions of nodes that exist within what we call the web. Facebook is becoming a knowledge aggregator for our personal information by developing a "social graph" that is a digitized version of our offline identity. Their social graph, announced in June, is a proprietary node schema that warehouses our personal relationships, social interactions (photos, comments, personal profile), and our "likes" (books, movies, news articles, products). By compiling this information, a personal node develops that will become the proprietary schema file for how links structure the internet's network of information and soon, each one of us will have our very own permutation of the web.
Two examples that have only scratched the surface on internet personalization, but demonstrate how 2010 is the year the internet has began this fundamental shift are the implementation of Facebook's social graph and Hunch's taste graph. Facebook's Social Plugins are an easy way for knowledge aggregators to display a variation of content and information that is theoretically more valuable to a user than static content the website would otherwise serve to a user. Hunch's taste graph is disadvantaged because it must be molded by a user who first must answer a sequence of questions, but allows a much deeper integration by allowing websites to use its API to mold an entirely new permutation for a user based on their taste graph.
