Why Social Media Falls Short of True Web Personalization [OPINION]

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of Trap.it, a personalized content discovery platform launching early this summer. Trapit was incubated at SRI and the CALO project.

To the credit of Mark Zuckerberg and Co., the Like button may very well be the most ingenious creation of the Web 2.0 world.

It is the simplest way to express a sentiment of approval and to broadcast that information to your social graph. The Like button has quickly become the dominant protocol for disseminating posts, pages, apps and more. And it’s not surprising that Google has countered with its own +1 concept.

But we still see the demand from users for more granular options, even in something in the form of a “dislike” button or a “love” button. The act of liking, predictably, means different things to different people.

For Facebook, “liking” really just means allowing the liked item to be a part of your network and world. And they’re sticking to it — so much so that Facebook has used the Like button to replace other gestures, like becoming a fan.

Indeed, one button to rule them all.

Except, the Like button and +1 button aren’t ultimately that useful to anyone who’s not Facebook or Google. It’s an early-inning opportunity in the face of something much bigger — true personalization.

Right now we’re all liking things around the web. As a result, my Facebook newsfeed has, ironically enough, come to resemble a Google Reader. It’s filled with updates from media outlets, bands and brands. Oh, and some updates from my actual friends are mixed up in there somewhere, too.

In the best case, the Like button has turned Facebook into the world’s largest, glorified RSS feed. When you click the Like button, you are simply subscribing to an all-or-nothing feed of content from a source. Facebook doesn’t select only those posts with a high likelihood of personal relevance. Facebook has become a broadcast platform. It’s no longer about me.

What we really need is a Me button.

High-Fidelity Interests

Now, Facebook certainly does have some insight into what I care about, articulated through my stated interests and my likes around the web. But these measures are roughly-hewn at best. They’re not adaptive, and they’re not granular.

In fact, they are more aligned with outward expressions, contrived statements of an identity I wish to project, and attributes used in targeting advertising at me.

We are constantly shifting and evolving individuals. Our focus and interests change in real time. Any system that proposes to really know me needs to have an ambient and authentic understanding of how I traipse about these more abstract concepts called “interests.”

The Like button on the other hand is a blunt instrument. Although Facebook can be said to be building a massive interest graph behind all of those likes, we’re talking about a relatively low-fidelity understanding of “me.”

Social is Only Part of the Answer

Conceptions of personalization today have become convoluted, distorted and diluted. The term has been co-opted to describe many things.

But let’s be clear about one thing: The “socialization” of the web is not personalization.

Telling me how many of my friends like an article or page is not personalization, it’s a new form of passive peer pressure or groupthink. Facebook’s idea of personalization has become the Web 2.0 equivalent of the Web 1.0 portal. Saying Facebook knows me because I like NPR and photography is like saying my “My Yahoo” page was personalized because it showed me San Francisco weather forecasts and local sports scores.

Personalization implies a much greater level of control and a significantly more tailored experience than social can ever offer.

Many companies recognize this and are attempting to address the issue. Yet even these services that most purport to establish relevance based on the interest graph fail to provide compelling personalized content recommendations.

These services all rely too heavily on collaborative techniques and misguided and simplistic interpretations of the social graph, or they simply lack the sophistication to scale beyond the same 100 (or 500) media outlets and professional blogs already saturating the echo chamber.

All of these approaches tend to converge within localized topic areas, and that, to put it bluntly, is just boring. It’s also why none of these efforts in so-called personalized content and news have succeeded or caught on with mainstream audiences.

The Me button on the other hand, starts from a fundamentally different understanding of relevance. The Me button is as easy as the Like button. One click to personalize, and to pivot.

It’s All About Me

The Me button understands I’m interested in complex, multi-dimensional topic areas or concepts, not a just sources or keywords.

The Me button moves with me as the content it discovers evolves my interest and knowledge in a topic simply by the act of being consumed. The Me button adjusts volume based on engagement.

The Me button not only makes sure I don’t miss the biggest stories of the day but is also constantly canvasing the nooks and crannies of the web to uncover for me the gems my social network never could.

The Me button combines promised precision and reach of search with the perceived serendipity of social discovery.

It will delight me day after day by proactively and accurately discovering for me the stuff I know I want and the stuff I really want but didn’t know. It will adapt to my evolving interests, continually improving and proactively exploring these boundaries to build a better understanding of … well, me.

In fact, it’s not about understanding the content as much as it’s about understanding me first and foremost. It sounds like a simple shift, but it is radically difficult to achieve, technologically speaking. What I describe is one of the hardest engineering problems of our time.

Therein lies the rub. True personalization is primarily about people, not about what people read, watch or listen to. People grow, evolve and change. We never sit still. We’re always in flux, by nature.

But this doesn’t mean that such a fine-tuned level of personalization isn’t achievable. The Me button is basically a natural evolution in content discovery and has even been positioned by some as the next major phase in the life of the consumer web. And though it’s early in the game, some of the best minds in technology are dedicating themselves to cracking this nut.

From my perspective, the most successful approach to the Me button requires tapping into a balance between its two core components — deep focus on the individual and great sourcing. Though each one on its own is a worthy challenge, the balance between the two is the ultimate and necessary goal.

Deep personalization truly places you at the center of the equation by building a unique and dynamic interest model for each and every user. This model is based on your actual tastes and preferences, not what’s trending, not what’s popular with your friends or people that look like you on paper and not solely on your outward representation in the social graph.

The other piece, great sourcing, has two facets: quality and scope — that is, the required ability to tackle a significant chunk of the real-time web, uncovering those golden nuggets outside the echo chamber, and doing so with a strong focus on the best and most relevant content.

That’s why the Me button doesn’t stop at news. Sure, it delivers to me the best and most relevant news and blog posts on my favorite topics and interests, but it also recommends deals and product information, things to do and even media like videos and podcasts, all picked just for me and based on my current context — from time of day, to location, to the platform I’m using.

The Me button is really a virtual personal assistant in the end — a prosthetic that helps me own the web, once and for all.

Shaken, Not Stirred

Don’t take me to be hating entirely on social, though. A blended approach that uses social for what social is good for is ideal. It’s just that knowing what my friends think only really matters once you know what I think.

Putting my friends before me is putting the cart before the horse. MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser’s recent TED talk outlines this point pretty well.

He notes that what we need is an information world that “gives us a bit of Justin Bieber and a bit of Afghanistan,” marked by controls that let us filter content by any number of factors — relevance, importance, comfort (topics that can be difficult to discuss or read), challenge level and points of view (with an option to see “alternative”).

The key to successful personalization is remembering that I am both the origin and the target of the system’s relevance. But that said, it needs to expand and routinely test my bounds if I am to grow.

Ultimately, the Me button should operate in a similar fashion, giving me a hearty main course of content selected just for me with sides of the best of what’s currently important in my social network and the biggest or most important stories of the day at a macro level.

The next generation of the web will be naturally and necessarily driven by the potential of personalization, in all aspects from mobile to media. The social web has brought us so far, but in doing so has also emphasized its own limitations in this area. When we finally achieve this goal, the result will be as important and ubiquitous as search or social networking has been in other stages of the web’s evolution. But let’s not water it down with lightweight parameters and misrepresentations of personalization’s true potential.

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