With Curation, we’ll no longer surf the web. But What Then?

Remember the uproar caused when Twitter revealed its intent to instill an algorithmic feed? Outraged #RIPTwitter slammed the changes before they even came out: proclaiming everything from the death of new organic content to Twitter’s complete lack of empathy with its users. But as Jack Dorsey knows, curated material is exactly where the internet is going towards — and Twitter’s adopting of an algorithmic feed was just the company finally deciding to play ball.

But algorithmic feeds are just one piece of the puzzle. Features like “You May Also Be Interested In” and Netflix’s recommended shows have existed for years, and even before them were suggested purchases by Amazon and other online retailers. These functions have always existed to coax some semblance of a workflow into the vastness of the internet, to shrink the web just enough for it to fulfill the user’s — and advertiser’s — needs.

The Future of Curation is AI

Online marketing has always been about removing the barriers between the customer and the product. Ads remove the knowledge barrier: educating people of a solution they didn’t know. Online shipping and browsing remove the physical barrier. But now, curation will mark the moment when we finally remove the mental barrier: the actual planning and choosing that plagues us at the moment we make purchases. That’s why the golden standard for curation is thought to be personal internet assistants, and it’s why every company is so interested in releasing their own.

Though the current big four AIs (Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Okay Google) are focused on productivity, they are continuously being advanced to do much more. Facebook’s jump into the industry with human-assisted AI MoneyPenny is a telling sign. By increasing the scope of AI to include purchases and personal logistics, FaceBook hopes it will be able to penetrate the shopper’s mental barrier and bring to it the web’s strongest driver of advancement — ad money.

Image Credit to Social News Daily

The ultimate assistant would not be close to anything we currently have . It won’t just be something as “cute” as Siri or Alexa that has a locked-in variety of functions and cross-connectivity. This assistant will be our own personal virtual intelligent butler: connecting and interacting with us through Augmented Reality or Internet of Things appliances like a benevolent Hal 9000. What need will there be for Google-fu when I no longer even see a search engine, because everything I want will always be readily presented to me with a tailored selection? The assistant would behave exactly as a real professional aide would: ordering flowers and setting up an Uber ride and restaurant reservation when I tell it simply: “Mother’s Day dinner. Not too fancy. 6pm. 4 people. Also flowers.”

…It’s so smart, it orders the Uber because it already knows that I don’t have a car.

Many might recognize that some of these functions are already possible with services like Magic that utilize real people behind the scenes to figure out the logistics for you. With advanced AI and curation however, vague statements like “Not too fancy” can actually be translated by your personal algorithm into a price range. Then it would sort a database like Yelp to find the available restaurants fitting the criteria and — here it triumphs over its human counterpart — compare them to your historical eats and use that data to either provide you with a selection or pick one for you.

What Does This Mean For Developers and New Products?

Think about your current approach to your search engine results: When was the last time you’ve ever bothered to go to pages 5+ for your Google search? I know I never do, and it’s this behavior that’s created Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a discipline completely dedicated to helping products grab real estate in the first two pages.

SEO consultants work by finding and utilizing whatever keywords are most relevant to their business but paradoxically least used by their competition. When most or all our web experiences becomes curated, SEO will become more important than ever before as curation becomes the only organic exposure the product will see. Like the Google result pages we never scroll through, whatever we use for curation suggest anything past their first few results either.

Image Credits to EADS Solutions

In order to be found by curation, new services will have to become increasingly niche. If we were to compare it to our current era where we have something like “Yelp for the Boomer generation,” this next age would blow it out of the water with a “Portland Yelp for Boomers that only like Greek cuisine.” Only by being so specific both product-wise and geographically will a product be able to get that first result spot — because they will actually have been designed almost exclusively for that demographic.

An issue however lies in what happens after these super-niche products take hold and succeed. If the market becomes crowded as it should in a free market with decreasing barriers (an increasingly tech-savvy population and decreasing difficulties in development), these super-niche products will not be able to expand outside of their demographic . Since they were curated due to their super niche focus, attempting to grow and generalize their product for a larger user base might lead to them being dropped from their own users’ curations.

For example, if the Portland Yelp for Boomers that like Greek cuisine now tries to expand to Redwood California — it loses its advantage for its original Portland users and will be replaced by their competitor who did not expand. Its Redwood content will be useless for its Portland base, and the curator might decide then that it is now only 50% relevant. This can happen even if its not a geological expansion but a product one. If it wanted to expand to include Vietnamese cuisine, the new information would lower the service’s value to its original users and — depending on the size of competition and severity of the curating algorithm — result in it being curated for neither.

Currently, this product expansion stage is ideally where a startup “clicks” and explodes in growth. In a curated world however, this step may not be as easy to achieve since users will rely on curation more than search, advertisements, or even word of mouth. For entrepreneurs, this represents a major change in startup goals and objectives. Hockey Puck growths will be more difficult than ever, and so products will need to be profitable faster than ever. If barriers to entry are decreased enough, investors may no longer even be needed for more simple services — not that they’ll be interested anymore as the potential for Return on Investment (ROI) decreases due to drastically smaller markets.

Of course, that’s all assuming that the barriers to both development and businesses become insignificantly small. Reality is not like that, and thus the results will differ as well. This speculation may very well happen only to very specific crowded industries where the assumptions are more true: such as simple productivity apps or mobile games.

What is an absolute fact however, is that a curated experience represents a very real positive change for both users and the web. New products and startups should take heed to the curation trend and incorporate it into a critical part of their development agenda. Even existing and successful companies should analyze how curation will play a role in their specific industry and have a proactive plan to make it work in their favor. Though the biggest beneficiaries of curation will be the users and the startup-come-unicorns that successfully push it through, companies ignoring the trend are doomed to be left in the dust.

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