The Web evolves from foraging to sucking

By Dominic Jones

THE web is evolving from a model where people go out in search of information using a browser and search engines to a model where they increasingly pull in information of their choice from the Internet into a variety of software applications and personal homepages.

The choices users make for what information sources they allow onto their screens could have profound implications for companies that rely on the web to communicate and do business. Will your company be on users’ VIP lists is a question corporate communications professionals need to be thinking about.

How are you making connections and providing value to your company’s stakeholders — employees, customers, influencers and shareholders — so that they will want to invite you in? What are you doing to provide useful content in flexible, extensible ways that fit individuals’ preferences?

An article in the Times of London reports on statements made by Yahoo! vice president Tapan Bhat in which he says personalization has become “more important” than search. Although he believes search remains important, search itself will become more personalized.

Of course, this is already happening through things like RSS feeds, widgets and technologies like XBRL. That’s why I found the Marketwire Dashboard Mobile Financial announcement the most interesting to come out of the NIRI conference yesterday. But I don’t agree that personalization is already more important than search, or that it ever will be. They will co-exist.

I also think we still are in the early stages. Adoption remains confined to a niche audience — the young and tech savvy. And whether personalized homepages like Netvibes or desktop widgets or plain old Excel with an XBRL feed will be the next killer app for the Web is too early to tell.

However, with companies like Yahoo! betting big on the sucking model rather than foraging and browsing, corporate web communicators should be formulating plans. I think a good hedge is to start with building meaningful websites that engage people so that they will be willing to suck your content into their personal space.

And that, dear reader, is the only reason I’m doing this stuff…

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