Big Data: Personalizing the User Experience with Anticipatory Systems

Increasingly companies are creating Big Data sets to analyze and scan for insights.  But while most companies are collecting a lot more data than they previously were capable, there are a few companies, like internet giants Facebook and Google, which are dwarfing all other companies in the sheer volume of information that they’re able to collect.

Google, for example, responds to billions of search queries every day.  In 2009 Google demonstrated that they were able to ‘predict’ trends based on the frequency and nature of search term criteria.  For example, they found that by looking at what and how people search for information on a specific topic, like influenza, they are often able to accurately make predictions.   In the case of influenza, Google is able to more accurately identify in real time the spread of the disease compared to the method used by the CDC for collecting data from hospitals which often takes a week or two to aggregate.

Jonathan Yates of the Motley Fool wrote that “Having over one billion users that account for one-fifth of the daily page views on the Internet, the amount of data that Facebook encounters in a continuim renders to it a tremendous competitive advantage for exploiting Big Data opportunities.  Google and Microsoft are also similarly situated due to the dominance of the Web browser and search engine for each.”

Companies like Google and Facebook are at a competitive advantage with the information that they’ve assembled.  That puts them also in a position to create products and new services that no other companies can possibly attempt.  With trives of information about both you and everything in your world, these companies are beginning to build a type of software called ‘anticipatory systems.’

Owen Thomas writes that “the true challenge for Apple, Google and Facebook is how to design a great anticipatory service around a specific need — without feeling creepy or, worse, clumsy. So much of what makes an anticipatory system great lies in the nuances of the service. Written prompts and design cues will play a huge role in getting people comfortable with computers that know a lot about us and make eerily accurate guesses.”

Antonio Regalado writes for ReadWrite that the MIT Technology Review that “For the data refineries of Silicon Valley, like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, the merger of big data and personal data has been a goal for some time. It creates tools advertisers can use, and it makes products that are particularly ‘sticky,’ too. “