Personalized Context – from user stickiness to Icentered contextivity
Context is king!
On the web, all is a click away. I can go anywhere, anytime, it’s all there. Searching for it, consuming it, interacting with it, and using it for my socializing, for my work, e-mail, instant messaging, social networks, forums, blogs, communities… It’s overwhelming!
Endless availability makes it difficult to sort out the noise. I have 24 hours a day – No more.
The gap between what I could have done and what I can actually accomplish widens, leading to two growing concerns in sifting for relevant interactions in all this over pour:
- Am I wasting my limited attention capacity on things I could do without?
- Am I missing, in all that noise, things I would have wanted to give attention to?
Both questions seem to lead to the same problem definition:
Is there a way to make my web interactions more in my context, relevant to me, to my needs, to my way of doing things?
Under prevailing approaches, a site-centric world view, the context in which I interact, is that of the site. If I go to Amazon I am now in the context of Amazon. To provide me with relevance when interacting with a site, I need to provide that site with personal information enabling it to categorize and profile me.
With my profile in hand, the site can now calculate better what to present to me. And to improve the delivered relevance, they require that I increasingly expose more about myself, explicitly or through their tracking of my actions in their site.
Providers use my profile as glue to ensure my user stickiness – keeping me a captive. Once I have a fine tuned profile, I am caught in a golden cage of a specific provider. To provide relevance, the site needs to maintain a representation of me in the system. Explicit and implicit information I provide and allow being collected on me, is sorted into a “USER” profile. From my name, to my most frequently visited web-address… if the piece of information has a proper place in the description – it is logged.
This site centric approach leads to an impasse. My profile with-in Amazon is segmented and reflects only what I have explicitly shared or implicitly allowed to be learned in Amazon. My accumulated interest around topical information gathered from interactions around specific topics in other sites, forums…. are not reflected in any implicit way in recommendations and profile fine-tuning within Amazon.
As long as the site centric paradigm prevails, providing inclusive relevance of users’ interactions requires that we allow increasingly intimate profiling to be shared with an increasing number of providers, and those providers will converge on a standard description that is interoperable by all of them. There is an inherent impasse. It is impossible to create a standard description that will fit any user affinities, for any provider all the time. It is impossible to objectify our subjective context.
This is before we even begin to address the privacy doomsday implications that stem from this scenario…
Mastering contextual personalization must be in the hands of the only one who should know all about me in order to draw my context – and that is me! A shift from personalization to contextivity. Contextivity is humanizing. I am in the center and my dynamic personal context is a guiding principle for a new level of conversations. By contextualizing my interactions they become relevant for me.
