I was typing an address into the Chrome address bar when I realised just how much like the Floo Network Chrome is. I start typing an address, and by the time I finish typing I would have gone through ten other websites which were on the way, just getting a glimpse of each before moving on to my final destination.
There were important differences too though. The glimpses of places one gets on a journey through the Floo are the same for everyone, as long as they are all going from point A to point B. Not so for Chrome: Google has started personalising. The journey Chrome takes one on the way to one's destination is unique to the person using it. A journey that is supposed to be random, still random, but a controlled personalised randomness. More than that, I've realised that even the destination is unique to the person using it when using the search function: this, I came to know from Eli Pariser's talk about 'filter bubbles' on TED.
While I like the idea of not having to sort through the junk that appears when a search is not personalised, I do have to acknowledge the problem Pariser highlights in his talk as a serious one. A filter personalising and editing out information based on our past choices creating a bubble, hence restricting us from getting the information outside it because we didn't seek to access the information in the past. The problem more worrisome in its insidiousness, because we just cannot see the information that's gradually being edited out, and it is hard to complain, because we are being shown exactly we want.
Of course, the situation is not as bad as it could be yet, but with increasing personalisation everywhere, it might be eventually.
