Imagine a world where ever person who interacted with a Web site had a different experience. An experience that was closely tailored to their interests. An experience that minimized the amount of time that they spent wading through irrelevant information. An experience that was all signal and no noise. Imagine a Web site that is absolutely relevant for each user.
I call such a site The Personalized Web.
Are we there yet? Some would say that we are close, but I have to disagree. Yes, some sites know your name. Some sites allow you to customize what appears on your main page. Some sites even let someone else customize what appears on your main page. However, all of this involves a great deal of manual input by either the user or someone who knows the user. This personalization is also fairly shallow.
What I am looking for is something that is much deeper and much richer. I am looking for a site that will...
- Generate a different site map and navigation scheme for each user.
- Bring the most relevant parts of the site to the front and send the least relevant parts of the site to the back.
- Treat me like an individual and not force me to use a least-common-denominator and one-size-fits-all user interface.
- Scale the fonts used based on the preferences and abilities of the user (e.g. older viewers get slightly bigger fonts).
The Web Server as we know it is dead.
Well, maybe the Web Server isn't dead, but it certainly isn't doing much. The problem is that what Web Server can do is quickly serve up static content. The problem is that with The Personalized Web, very little is static. Maybe images and PDFs are static, but that's about it. Everything else is rendered dynamically.
This is already happening. Application servers like ATG Dynamo that use JHTML and BEA WebLogic that use JSP have already dramatically reduced what the Web Server does. Most requests for most pages fall right through the Web Server and are passed on to the application server. At some point, you have to ask "Why even have the Web Server layer in the architecture?" Why not just hook the application server up to the Net?
The Personalized Web also makes the role of Content Management much different. No longer will people be creating and promoting HTML and other static assets. Instead, they will be creating XML assets that will be deployed to the application server and merged with an XSL stylesheet at the time of the request. This means that application servers will need much stronger integrated content management capabilities that deploy to a database and not necessarily the file system.
Before I wrap up, I have to say one thing. Web Servers will not go away entirely. A site like my whatapita.com does not need The Personalized Web. Most of my content is static and does not need to be personalized. However, The Personalized Web is extremely relevant for commerce and content companies and I see them being the first to adopt these new architectures.
Editors Note: We are taking these ideas seriously here at MarketingProfs.com. Our new improved site (which we launched this week) allows you to do some customization. It's far from perfect, but at least it's in the right direction!
Copyright © 2001 Chris O'Leary
