Editor’s note: Dries Buytaert is the co-founder and CTO of Acquia and the inventor of Drupal.
Here is one idea that arrived before its time: the push-based web, where information comes to us, versus the search-dominant web we’re most familiar with. Those who are looking at the push web in the context of a new mobile and connected device-centric world might be having a real 90s flashback (remember PointCast?), except this time the push web could take off and transform the economy as we know it.
With devices like Apple Watch shipping without a Safari
browser, we’ll have to rely on highly personal bits of incoming relevant
information. And now that companies can collect enough data from our
ever-present devices, they have the opportunity to master one-to-one
communications.
This Time, It’s Personal
We’re witnessing the slow decline of industries that fail
to cater to the individual. The first real disruptors in this vein were
aggregators: sites like Facebook that created a single destination and
curated content that mattered to an individual. Publishers like The New
York Times clearly felt the pain of Facebook’s disintermediation of
their news, even recently giving Facebook first-mover rights on articles before publishing on The New York Times website.
The real reason Facebook may be winning over traditional
publishers is this one-to-one understanding of the consumer, or the
ability to tailor what people see in their newsfeeds to their personal
interests. Few, if any, traditional publishers have mastered this
dynamic. Beyond publishing, other mainstays ranging from malls to record
stores have experienced similar fallout from aggregators and personal
algorithms (think about the customization achieved through the Spotify
or Pandora effect).
In order for companies to survive in this new
custom-everything world, they need to both co-exist with current
aggregators and harness the data they collect within their own user platform
to get direct, one-to-one connections to their customers. Rather than
rely solely on the few successful, third-party power aggregators like
Facebook, for the sake of fair competition, companies should invest in
retaining control over their own data and customer experiences. From
there, any connected device can serve as a conduit for one-to-one
communications. The smaller the screen and more personal the customer
experience, the more opportunity there is for the push web to thrive.
Data-Driven: Well…Almost
While the idea of data-driven decisions has been talked about a lot,
very few companies are doing it well. As a frequent flyer, I’m
regularly frustrated by how little the airline and hotel industry knows
about me. In a perfect world, if my flight from Boston to San Francisco
is canceled because of weather, the airline’s partner hotel chain should
know and push a room recommendation as a notification to my iPhone.
Google Now has taken the idea of live information pushed through cards
and delivered it directly to the consumer. I envision a near future
where this concept will be applied across many different industries,
eliminating the friction from basic tasks like shopping for a birthday
gift. Right now, if I see that my friend has a birthday on Facebook, I
might spend hours searching for the perfect gift for her.
In the future, my phone might know what types of gift this
particular friend prefers and proactively push a card of recommendations
to my phone’s home screen 10 days before her birthday. With just a few
clicks, I can get that gift delivered, gift-wrapped, to her doorstep.
The implications of this idea are much larger than just convenient
shopping; it could mean gaining hours of personal productivity per day
that were once spent searching the web with browsers.
A Smarter Economy
These one-to-one interactions and deep understanding of
individuals won’t be limited to the consumer experience — it could also
disrupt production of goods. Today, we try to anticipate consumer demand
and create mass amounts of products that are pushed to the market via
global distribution channels and marketing. A push economy could mean an
end to standardized products and the introduction of highly customized
goods and services, produced on-demand and delivered to consumers.
Take shoes for example. A customer could buy a pair of
running shoes equipped with sensors to gather data about the condition
of the shoes and the habits of the runner. That connected shoe will
communicate with the apparel manufacturer to notify the brand when the
sneakers are worn out and the owner is in need of a new pair. From
there, the company could reach out to the customer reminding them to buy
new shoes and directing them to a relevant sale. Or, to take it a step
further, the company could analyze the consumer’s stride, cross
reference it with the time it took for the shoe to wear out, and create a
custom shoe specific to that person’s running style and habits.
It’s a huge opportunity to customize goods and minimize
waste. Furthermore, traditional online and offline retailers could face a
real threat, as the one-to-one relationship between brands and
consumers jumps over middlemen. This level of personalization may even
signal a return to our pre-Industrial Revolution roots, where goods were
always tailor-made for individuals based on personal preferences, sizes
and more.
We’re creeping closer and closer to a fully realized
Internet where we don’t need to search for information; it will come to
us. (One sign of the “pull-web-pocalypse”: formerly popular browsers are shuttering.)
To adapt, companies need to recognize that the opportunity is far more
vast than it was in the 90s. A combination of new user platforms, the
ability to act on data, and new devices are the perfect storm it will
take to make the push web work in 2015 and beyond.