10e20 Blog

It’s what you want. The very popular StumbleUpon concept is simple: when you sign up, you provide the service with some of your interests, and you install the neat little toolbar. Once you’ve got the application installed, you can simply begin stumbling and you can tell the system how you feel about the page that was served to you. By clicking on the thumbs up “I like it” button or by clicking on the thumbs-down button, you teach the SU system what content you truly enjoy. By stumbling and sharing your finds to other users, you’re personalizing your own experience and the experience of your peers as well.

The personalization concept — where content is being provided based on your own desires — has proven to be quite successful. Since it was introduced two years ago, StumbleUpon now boasts over 1.8 million users, and is continually expanding. Version 2.90 of the toolbar, which came out earlier this week, is incorporating the relatively new video social search engine that it unveiled in December. StumbleUpon is truly growing…

And so is Digg.

At half the amount of subscribers that StumbleUpon has, Digg is aiming to emulate the SU concept, a recent BusinessWeek article has reported. Hot on the heels of StumbleUpon, Digg (which launched its own video extension five days after StumbleUpon did) is aiming even higher to SU’s core success model: a recommendation tool.

According to Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder who is quoted in the article, “Digg will be smart enough to know what interests you” and it will serve content that fits within the tastes of its users. For current subscribers, this means that Digg will serve content based on the stories users have dugg or buried. If you used the service to promote pages that you truly liked, the Digg system appears to not be much different from StumbleUpon.

More and more companies are involving themselves in what can be an imminent threat (well, perhaps not just yet — and it still depends on who you ask): personalization. Google’s personalized search is being promoted more heavily. As more and more people realize that there are only a few items that may be of interest to them when they search, systems are learning to adapt to user preferences through their own algorithms. As Google explains it, if you’re searching for “dolphin” because you want to learn more about the football team from Miami, you’re not overly concerned with results pertaining to marine life. Depending on the types of pages you visit and the domains upon which these sites are located, Google’s personalized search will rank these pages higher than the undesirable results, thus providing you with a searching experience that like that of no other user. To Google, this is a move provide quality results and reduce the unnecessary clutter.

To make our websites shine through these results and be obvious to the viewer, there will likely be obstacles that we’ll need to overcome. Good content is a necessity. Telling your friends is a good way to get the word out. Promoting these pertinent sites through social search is still going to be very useful.

We’re bordering on a new era, one with incredible challenge and obstacles, but one that does have the end user — you — in mind, and hopefully everyone in all communities will be happy with the results.