Me&my GROCER - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, Nov 6, 2000 by Alexei Obeskovic

According to Mayya, Webvan is in the process of evaluating several such personalization tools and expects to roll out real-time recommendation features on its site in the near future, though he wouldn't say exactly when. He defends his company's late adoption of the technology, saying Webvan is still figuring out how to make the tools work best for its particular business.

"You can put something out without enough testing," he says, "and you'd probably end up with something that's not a big win." But as personalization tools like rules-based and collaborative-filtering technology become basic site building blocks instead of luxury additions, Webvan will need to learn how to best leverage the technology for its business or face falling behind the competition.

It's clear, though, that Webvan has a good idea of the direction its site is headed. Webvan aims to personalize its grocery store to the point where vegetarian shoppers see only meat-free products, and kosher patrons browse only rabbinically sanctioned victuals. "The idea is to make it easy for the customer," adds Mayya. "What we are trying to do is go beyond the experience that you might have in a normal, physical store."

FLIGHT OF THE FIREFLY

What ever happened to personalization's great bright hope?

Early one Sunday morning in June 1997, news of personalization landed on doorsteps across America. Within the pages the New York Times Magazine was a 4,000-word article on an up-and-coming company, Firefly.

The Boston-based company was among the first to release so-called collaborative-filtering technology -- software that lets a Web site compare profiles of all its visitors to figure out whether they share any traits or affinities. If Firefly discovered that people who listen to the Beatles also tend to listen to the Pogues, for instance, it could make personal recommendations to all Beatles fans who visited the site. The potential was enormous, and many people regarded personalization as the future of online commerce. Heavyweights Yahoo and Barnesandnoble.com were among the notables signed up to use Firefly's technology.

Three-and-a-half years later, Firefly is a dim memory. The company was acquired by Microsoft for $30 million in 1998 and was summarily folded into Microsoft's Passport product. Ironically, Microsoft passed over Firefly's collaborative-filtering technology, focusing instead on its newer technologies that allow Web surfers to securely store their personal profile information on the client side. This technology now powers Passport's Single Sign-In feature, which lets a person navigate various sites without having to re-enter registration information.

"The two most valuable things [Microsoft] got out of Firefly were Passport and a set of people who understood how privacy impacted the rest of the user experience," says Max Metrall, former Firefly chief technology officer and now founder and CTO of San Francisco-based PeoplePC.

And while Firefly's original personalization efforts disappeared without fanfare, the promise of personalization is far from forgotten.