Early one Sunday morning in June 1997, news of personalization landed on doorsteps across America. Within the pages of the New York Times Magazine was a 4,000-word article on an up-and-coming company, Firefly.The Boston-based company was among the first to release so-called collaborative-filtering technology – software that lets a Web site compare profiles of all its visitors to figure out whether they share any traits or affinities. If Firefly discovered that people who listen to the Beatles also tend to listen to the Pogues, for instance, it could make personal recommendations to all Beatles fans who visited the site. The potential was enormous, and many people regarded personalization as the future of online commerce. Heavyweights Yahoo (YHOO) and Barnesandnoble.com were among the notables signed up to use Firefly's technology.
Three-and-a-half years later, Firefly is a dim memory. The company was acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) for $30 million in 1998 and was summarily folded into Microsoft's Passport product. Ironically, Microsoft passed over Firefly's collaborative-filtering technology, focusing instead on its newer technologies that allow Web surfers to securely store their personal profile information on the client side. This technology now powers Passport's Single Sign-In feature, which lets a person navigate various sites without having to re-enter registration information.
"The two most valuable things [Microsoft] got out of Firefly were Passport and a set of people who understood how privacy impacted the rest of the user experience," says Max Metrall, former Firefly chief technology officer and now founder and CTO of San Francisco-based PeoplePC.
And while Firefly's original personalization efforts disappeared without fanfare, the promise of personalization is far from forgotten.
Personalization technology is at the heart of many of today's most popular online destinations. It's what makes it possible for Amazon.com (AMZN) to spit out book recommendations and the Lands' End (LE) Web site to suggest the right swimsuit size, for example.
"Firefly was very influential in getting people to expect personalized experiences on the Web," says Steve Larsen, senior VP of marketing at Minneapolis-based Net Perceptions (NETP) , a collaborative-filtering software vendor that launched shortly after Firefly. Larsen estimates that more than half of today's leading e-commerce sites use some form of personalization technology; his firm has more than 200 customers.
The technology has come a long way since 1997. Advances in analytics and collaborative filtering, along with decreasing storage prices, have converged to make today's personalized sites more powerful and more accurate. But Firefly's initial goal still stands. "There are people out there, not just browsers," says Metrall. "Turn on the lights."
