Personalization broadly known as customization

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Personalization
Personalization
(broadly known as 
customization
) consists of tailoring a service or a product
to accommodate specific individuals, sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. A
wide variety of organizations use personalization to improve 
customer satisfaction
, digital
sales conversion, marketing results, branding, and improved website metrics as well as for
advertising
. Personalization is a key element in 
social media
 and 
recommender systems
.
Personalization is affecting every sector of society -- work, leisure, and citizenship.
The idea of personalization is rooted in ancient rhetoric as part of the practice of an agent or
communicator being responsive to the needs of the audience. When industrialization led to
the rise of mass communication, the practice of message personalization diminished for a
time. But the significant increase in the number of mass media outlets that use advertising
as a primary revenue stream, and as they sought to attract customers through buying space
and time in forms of entertainment and information, they made efforts to gain knowledge
about the specific demographic and psychographic characteristics of readers and viewers.
[1]
Digital media and internet
Another aspect of personalization is the increasing prevalence of 
open data
on the internet.
Many companies make their data available on the internet via 
APIs
, web services, and 
open
data
 standards. One such example is Ordnance Survey Open Data.
[2]
 Data made available in
this way is structured to allow it to be inter-connected and re-used by third parties.
[3]
History of Personalization

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Data available from a user's 
social graph
may be accessed by third-party 
application software
to be suited to fit the personalized 
web page
 or 
information appliance
.
Current 
open data
standards on the internet include:
1. Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML)
2. DataPortability
3. 
OpenID
4. 
OpenSocial