Someone invented the term "portalopoly" to describe the ongoing battle for "eyeball ownership" between the portal superpowers. To be sure, there is a future for portals and a big one at that. But portal evolution there will be, and what the portal of the future will look like begs some serious crystal ball gazing.
Theoretically, everyone could have their own personal portal, but how many people would, in practice?
One novel alternative being touted is the "personal portal". Kind of like bookmarks or favorites on your browser, only better arranged and displayed on your own personal Web page, so as to be more easily accessible and saved on your hard drive for a quick getaway. The example given was certainly impressive, in respect of the number of cross-linked and categorised Web sites that the fellow in question had included in his own Web "portal".
Theoretically, everyone could have their own personal portal, but how many people would, in practice? Perhaps Microsoft will build a rapid development feature into the next version of its operating system. Even then, only a few would bother to use it - research has shown that only 20% of users even bother to customise the defaults on their browser, let alone design their own start-up page. Perhaps intelligent agent software that automatically detects and records your level of excitement as you visit various Web destinations? Gives a new meaning to the concept of being "wired"!
Besides, what about serendipitous information? In a recent interview with Peter Schwartz, futurist Alvin Toffler made the following observation: "One of the issues of the information technologies that we have today is the question of serendipity. If you only get the information you start out looking for, you`re going to be pretty stupid."
This brings us to the concept of personalised pages from news and portal sites. The major downside is the same - most people will not spend the time needed to sufficiently personalise the pages to make them really useful. That does not detract from their usefulness for the 10% of people that do make the effort. But it re-affirms the future of the aggregators who will decide on behalf of the other 90% what news they will be fed from day to day and what new resources on the Web they will be alerted to - mostly in the form of advertising.
Collaborative filtering can help. As pointed out by Robert Seidman in "The Web`s Personality Disorder", this means getting information such as: "80% of the people who are kind of like you clicked on THIS story, and you didn`t. Would you like to read it?" This isn`t perfect either, but it at least takes some of the burden off the customer for whatever personalised service you`re offering. While this is useful and also provides serendipitous information, the main problem, he points out, is the same as before. Even if you take the time to personalise, those "kind of like you" probably will not - simply because the odds are stacked against it in the first place.
I happen to be one of the believers. I believe that evolutionary change and technology developments will assist with personalisation. But this will not be the major threat to portals, even if Microsoft builds personal agents into the operating system. They will, however, be threatened by a more sinister force - that of competition for eyeballs, as increasingly more niche sites of every description expand their scope and qualify as "ports of first entry". For example, you might like to do the following, first thing every day:
- Read your mail.
- Check news headlines and share prices.
- Check your company`s bank balance (you are the owner and cash flow is important to you).
Which portal might you use in future? Perhaps the one you did not think of is a bank`s page (after all, you can transact on it). This particular banking site also happens to have a personalised news feed added to it, under licence from a major content supplier. In fact, you might even have an e-mail address called jbloggs@personalbank.co.za (you are a small business owner, and the bank gave it to you free as part of the service).
If this is a possibility, and I seriously believe it is, then one might ask how many such mini-portals will there be in future? I think this may give the mega-portals serious food for thought. In fact, the owners of these megasites will increasingly seek new and innovative ways to make money, currently earned mainly through interactive advertising.
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