A friend and associate of mine (David Link at WonderFactory) recently twittered about the fact that all the three major content portals are basically the same and asked "what's next?" in a Web portal experience.

Here it is: http://twitter.com/WonderfactoryNY/status/1354194077

The suspects here would be Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. I wanted to reply to the post and... (sort of) agree with David. I do think there are major differences but listing them out is too easy an answer and not where I think he is going.

Hey, twitter posts are half a calorie in terms of value and content. So I'll answer from an AOL perspective as we continue on our roadmap of super-setting the Web and giving our users more and more control.

At this point in terms of portal reinvention I think we're on the right path; but we know that "re-inventing", as in top-to-bottom, is not what the entrenched public really wants in many cases. They don't want a car with 3 wheels just so we can call it progress. When you have 50 million or a 100 million people coming to your sites, you have a tendency to listen to their needs. One of those needs is consistency and accepted formats. When you want to truly break the mold that can be an obvious inhibitor.

So I think the experience of a portal will change but not necessarily relative a Web page as we experience it today. It will be in your hands via smart-phone and projected on the living room wall and, like the wiii, you'll gesture to get what you want. This is not as far-fetched or far off as it could have sounded just three years ago. This is already upon us.

This portal will know no boundaries to data, or networking, or inter-connectedness to people. It will be ubiquitous and won't chain you to any one experience. And, though it will have a social networking component, you'll start to find shades of meaning beyond just "Friends". How many of you want all of your Facebook friends on the Living room wall and at that level of intimacy? ("Friend" possibly the most incorrectly used term of the age.)

You'll be able to filter the "news" in powers of 10, zooming outward or inward: your personal events ("I hear water outside"), your social circles ("Our neighbor's kitchen is flooded!"), your neighborhood ("Spring St. is flooded!"), your town ("Taxes just went up 10% to help fix flooding problem!"), your state ("State taxes just went up 5% on top of that local 10%"), your nation ("Obama to lower taxes!"), your entire world ("Taxes outlawed by G7 nations!"). And you'll be able to zoom in and out at these various levels of resolution and meaning and inter-connectedness. Meaning is everywhere. A good portal shoud be able to help you find it. Experiences today are so compartmentalized, dominated by the "module". We have to hammer at that one.

And all that said: personalization is the true next wave. Yes, all of us have been talking about it for years but NO ONE as done it well yet. Or at least to its full potential.

So the Portal is really you. And YOU are the portal. That is what it's going to be.

The team here will keep pushing toward this vision, whatever it is branded, and whatever device it sits on.

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