“This is just the tip of the iceberg. At some point, we could see a time when not only your Web experience is adaptive, but also your social connections – based merely on your current intent and interests.”
- Image by xbettyx via Flickr
The Adaptive Web: The Future of the Online Experience
Guest author Dr. Scott Brave is a founder and CTO of Baynote, a provider of personalization and digital marketing optimization technology.
Previous attempts at personalizing and optimizing online experiences have struggled to give consumers what they want. That’s because they’ve been focused on drawing conclusions about our intent based on our past behaviors or purchases or compiling more data on peoples’ social graphs. And while user profiles can tell us a lot of things, 1) they’re quickly outdated, and 2) they do a very poor job in helping us figure out what people really want and need in the moment.
What we need is to build a smarter approach that allows companies to adapt to their customers’ needs in real-time.
The concept of collective intelligence, which I’ll address a little further down below, will be critical to achieving this vision–something I like to think of as an “adaptive Web.” That is, a digital experience that is always relevant and based on users’ current intent and interests. It also must be device-agnostic, especially important given the increased mobility of the online experience — a challenge analyst firm Forrester calls “the Splinternet.”
In an adaptive Web scenario, the Web will truly come to life and become self-learning. We’ll see the Google way of determining linkages between sites and content go by the wayside in favor of an approach that’s based entirely on what the Web community at large and like-minded users within it found useful.
An adaptive Web experience would represent a dramatic shift in how we interact with the Web (or more accurately, how the Web interacts with us). Let me explain.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg. At some point, we could see a time when not only your Web experience is adaptive, but also your social connections – based merely on your current intent and interests.”
What An Adaptive Web Would Look Like:
Continues @http://www.readwriteweb.com
