Excite.com

For every Mobile App you develop  even before you get into doing Big Data or Prediction, you need to allow the user to customize it for their individual preferences. Personalization is a key ingredient. The other day while thinking on this subject, I remembered my earliest experience of using an online (web) service that could be heavily customized to my taste, and that was Excite.com. It should be around 1996-98, the portal, when it was the most fashionable technology, was my favourite. It was my homepage, where I went for search, latest news, used it extensively almost everyday. In the screenshot (courtesy web.archive.org) below you will see an area just below their logo on top left, that allowed users to personalize the page, add webparts of your choice. That meant you could have lot of third party content sources configured, kind of widgets, that allowed me to see stock information, news categories, weather,  latest email  all in a single page.

Later on when eXcite gradually faded I was sad for quite sometime on not finding a replacement that was half good as it was.

In the last two decades Internet has impacted our everyday life in profound ways and we think it has changed drastically, has it really, may be not that much!