The Hyper-Personalization of the Web, Redux Edition
Revisiting the idea of the hyper-personalized web from a different angle.
Every so often, you have an idea that you just can’t shake. I’m not sure why this is the case, my best guess would be that there’s something that initially piques your curiosity and then because the idea never takes a satisfactory form in the world, your curiosity for it only continues to grow. One of those ideas for me is the hyper-personalization of the web.
I wrote about this idea a number of years ago, here’s the opening paragraph:
What if websites and apps gave you a completely personalized experience, unique to just you? I don’t mean only recommending what movie to watch next but providing completely customized layout, styles, and interactions based on your unique preferences. One where no two people going to the same website would have the same experience.
That original essay explored that idea, which came from my observation that more and more of the websites and apps that I was using were providing me with a different experience than someone else using the same exact app. I wanted to think about what that might mean if you took that idea to the extreme.
Fast forward to today and the personalization of the web is continuing down this general trajectory that I noticed at that time. But it is still far from where I thought it might go. There are a few different reasons for this but one of the big ones is that it’s really hard to “hyper-personalize” anything that serves hundreds of thousands, let alone millions of customers. Everyone has different needs, wants, and desires. That means in order to even come close to possibly customizing something for all those different desires, you’d have to build a whole lot of stuff, which takes a lot of time, effort, and money.
That’s why there are consultants and agencies. They help close some of that gap between what you want and what the end product offers. Consultants are hired to “hyper-personalize” products for anyone (for a small fee of course 😉).
But what I hadn’t realized at the time I wrote that original essay was that we’d be getting a technology that makes scaling personalization much more feasible. And while generative AI is still far from perfect, it is quite amazing in what it can do. It’s getting closer and closer by the day to being able to generate almost anything that you can imagine.
Of course that means we’re starting to see various companies build these capabilities into the products that they offer. Another step towards hyper-personalization.
But there is another thing that I had assumed when I wrote that original essay. I had assumed that this personalization was going to come from the websites and apps that you visited, or more specifically, from the algorithms and data that were created and collected by the companies that ran those sites and apps. In fairness to me, this was a logical assumption, since there is a big incentive for companies to get more customers and have those customers spend more of their waking hours on their sites. People obviously like when things are made custom just for them, so all the incentives are aligned to continue to go in this direction and I expect that they will.
However, given that we now have a technology in generative AI that can write poems and code and even generate images, it doesn’t mean that those capabilities are only available for companies building products. They are available to consumers as well.
All of this is to say that I think it’s worth updating my original vision of a hyper-personalized web to be one that is one that is built by consumers, rather than just by companies.
Here’s how it might go down. Instead of having to rely on every single website to update itself and change they way it works (and of course falling far short of whatever it is you have in your own head), you’ll have the ability to update websites and apps (or build your own entirely!) however you want.
Take Netflix for example. While Netflix could continue to add more and more personalization to their product (and like I mentioned above, they will), they still have a brand that they maintain and care about, plus they’ll never know exactly what you want (nor will they likely build it just for you, given they have 100 million other people wanting something slightly different). Does that mean you’ll never get all the features you want from Netflix? I don’t think it does anymore.
Instead, I think the model flips. Instead of us having to rely on the businesses that control the websites that we use to update them to fit our needs, we’ll flip this on its head. We’ll be the ones to customize Netflix (and all the other sites out there) however we want. Do you want Netflix to show you all the recent tweets (Xs?) for what people are saying about the show you’re currently browsing? Just ask your AI assistant to add it and it will! Not only that but it will also save that configuration for the next time you visit too (unless of course later on you ask to remove it).
Taking this to the extreme, instead of having every website slowly customize themselves to be more like what you want, you will customize them to be exactly how you want. Don’t love the red and black color scheme of Netflix? Why not change it to purple and white? You should be able to do all that. And the best part is, you can do it and it won’t affect anyone else’s experience. They will be able to customize it however they want.
This is all still very hypothetical of course and there are a lot of challenges to implementing this that I am glossing over, but there are signs showing that this might be coming.
The last thing that I’ll say on this topic is something I mentioned in that original essay. There are still negative consequences that the hyper-personalization of the web (and everything else for that matter) will have on us as individuals and as a society. This Andy Warhol quote is worth quoting again:
“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.”
Losing some of this shared experience is something worth reflecting on. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that this hyper-personalization is inevitable. It’s also possible that if Andy Warhol were alive today he might revise his quote to say something like this:
“What’s great about this country is that America continues the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be browsing the web and know that the President can be browsing the web and customize it however he or she wants, Taylor Swift customizes the web however she wants, and just think, you too can customize the web however you want.”
Far fetched? Maybe. But maybe not.
If you’re curious about these ideas, let me know. I started tinkering around with this idea in the form of a Chrome extension that would enable users to add things to websites. It’s far away from being the ideal I envision above (I’m actually not even sure at this point if it’s possible to do this way) but it at least starts to demonstrate how this type of idea might come about.
If you’re a builder and want to contribute to this idea, head over to this Github repository and feel free to contribute to it. The more ideas the merrier.