Good luck, taikonaut! Here's hoping for both a success and an era of friendly competition.
7:56:27 PM    

Here's irony for you. Back in 1996, one of my adventures was relaunching the Spry browser brand as an ISP, Sprynet. CompuServe had bought Spry just as the browser market imploded, and one of our notions to recover the situation was to create a plain vanilla IP networking service to 'catch some our own churn', i.e., subscribers who were leaving CompuServe since all they wanted was Internet access, not a proprietary content bundle. When AOL acquired CompuServe, they decided they didn't need or want a no-content ISP, so they sold off the business to Earthlink, where hopefully my old subscribers have been happy.

Some time thereafter the archetypal browser brand, Netscape, was also swept into AOL's acquisitive maw. Today comes the news that AOL is considering relaunching the Netscape brand as .... wait for it .... a discount ISP sans content, to catch some of their own churn. Heh! Other than sweet irony, the reason to note this is the transparent admission of the decay of the core AOL value proposition. It's taken seven years for the rot to move from CompuServe's early adopting audience, to AOL's late adopting market, but the time has come.
5:48:21 PM    

Jupiter Research puts out a report suggesting that applying personalization to business sites is often more expense and hassle than benefit. There's a certain rich irony in seeing this debunking emerge from Jupiter, one of the more notorious hype shops of the dot-com era, but I suspect they are onto something:

A business contemplating the investment in a personalized, dynamic site really should throw out all the software salescritters and sit down and ask themselves honestly whether they have a product or service that is improved by personalization, and whether they actually have the capability, as a business, to deliver on that promise. In some cases the answer is honestly 'yes'. Amazon, as an obvious example, does have such a large selection that extrapolating what I might care about from my previous purchases does actually create value both for customer and company. OTOH, it's hard to see what value (for instance) is created at myBigAutoCo.com, if the end output is something that could have been figured out in a few minutes with an Edmund's book. There can even be a negative value contribution, if customers end up believing they are being steered toward purchases that aren't in their own best interests or don't meet their needs. (And dropping people into demographic or VALS clusters is not personalization, by this measure.)

Assume the website is a totally transparent facade. If the customer peering into the guts of the business would be unable to actually identify how the business is organized to benefit the individual as an individual, not a member of a class, then don't bother with personalization. The lack of value-add will eventually be discerned by the market, leaving the only happy party the personalization software vendor.

Update: Matthew Holt posts re a Forrester report on customer dissatisfaction with health plan websites. What seems to be in common here is the D'Oh! level idea that business sites should first get the basics down - quality content and easy navigation - and only then move onto personalization, if they are prepared to put some value behind it.
10:35:44 AM