Everything will be personalized for you

Personalization. That's the word of the year for 2008 and beyond.

It's where more and more websites are going and simply where they should be going? And what is that? Because that's what the people want. Some websites and services have already been doing this for quite a while.

In retail, think Amazon.com and their personalized shopping service. For years, they've been recommending more products for you to buy, based on your shopping habits. They've had over 60 million customers and simply put by CEO, Jeff Bezos, "We want to have over 60 million different stores."

Or, just think about the # of times you've seen or heard content companies branding a new web product, starting with "my." Just to rattle off a few...mySpace, My Yahoo, mySI, my Times, myCokeRewards. Let's face it - we, customers are a bit selfish these days. We want everything to be done for us individually, and in the way we want it to be.

So enough about the trend of how personalization is starting to evolve. Instead, let's talk about what should be the next steps in website personalization. Imagine visiting NYTimes.com and only viewing the type of stories you care about. Don't care about those stories on Home & Garden? Well, in the future, you won't even see those stories anymore. You'll be able to move content boxes around on the site to put the stories you care about up top, and just delete content areas you never read.

Or think about sports. You'll have one-click access to information about your favorite teams. Imagine a web page with stories on your favorite teams, from all across the web. Imagine being able to read your team's stories, watch video highlights, see photos...all that good stuff on one page.

The outlook of the web looks good. We're moving into a world where everyone will have their own Internet. The step after that will simply be linking everyone's Internet all together. You'll be able to see what types of content your friends care about. You'll be able to communicate with others who have similar tastes in content and sites you care about. The potential is endless.

The outlook is good.