What is the next force that will drive development and user expectations for web services?

The prevailing opinion I have heard is that it’s about context-based personalization.

Social context is obviously a top-of-mind focus of personalization at the moment, with a range of services attempting to bring aspects of social context into their services. The examples abound of services aiming to use other, like-minded people’s choices to help you make your decisions: recommendations, personalized adverts, “shared with you”, et. al.

Location context is also big component of personalization, and is drawing lots of attention, primarily in the area of mobile device and services, for the simple reason that mobile devices can provide location-based information for developers to use.

But drawing less attention, yet equally important, is the context of “time”. The context of time is implicit in any current discussion of location, yet somewhat missing from the discussion of social context.

Location-based applications are based on the idea of delivering services, offers and products to users relevant to their geographic location. We implicitly understand that delivering the services in a timely manner is a necessity, since people’s location can change rapidly, and that old geographic information may or may not be relevant. We understand that location is fluid and ever-changing.

But why don’t we assume the same about our social context? Our offline contacts (friends, co-workers, et. al.) naturally morph over time, strengthening, fading, losing touch, gaining strength and meaning. How can our online networks replicate this dynamically?

By and large, they don’t. Existing social services and applications are based on the premise that our social networks are more or less static. Granted, the applications provide ways for us to tweak our settings, our content, our levels of privacy and sharing in order to “be different people” to different people. But in action, it’s socially difficult to take many of these actions because the online decisions we make are so much more transparent and obvious than our offline decisions. The binary yes/no decisions and terminology used by most networks (e.g. “friend”) are unable to capture the nuance of our offline social relationships. Our learned, socially-acceptable ways to handle the changing nature of relationships have not yet adapted well to the Internet.

We know how to be social and manage relationships offline, but we’re still learning how to to this online.

Do we want to keep in touch with everyone permanently? Is technology forcing us to do this, or is it something people intrinsically want but have never had the tools to accomplish? Do we need to change the tools we use to connect socially online, or do we need to change our behaviour? Will our shared understanding of “what is right” socially change because of the tools we use?

Instead, can we create “temporary networks” that allow us to create temporary strong ties with people? Can we layer in temporary networks with our stronger, more important “permanent” networks?

How could this be valuable? Think of social environments where ties tend to be strong but short-lived: conferences, parties, events, reunions, trips; environments where we connect closely with people but may or may not want to continue the connection after the event is over.

Can we create services that allow us to connect strongly with people online during that event, but not force us to maintain the same level of connection afterward? Can my social service highlight my “temporary network” because that social context is more important during this period of time? Should my network “expire”?

Can I find a way to find people to connect to temporarily? How does a social web service help me find like-minded people that I want to interact with right here, right now?

How can we use the context of time to create new opportunities for social interaction? How can thinking about the context of time improve the value of our online social networks?