While we hate the name the editors at Trendwatching assigned to the trend – TWINSUMER sounds like something the Olsen twins would sport on their ever so thin wrists! – the write up of this trend is well worth reading. They define the trend like so:
consumers looking for items that are most relevant for them increasingly don’t rely on traditional press or editorial reviews nor on just any word of mouth but are going out of their way to seek out their taste ‘twins’; fellow consumers who are likeminded in that they think, react, enjoy and consume the way they do.
In the write up they discuss advances in collaborative filtering technology and how it is being applied by Amazon, Google, and by social networking sites such as Tribe. There are some new sites you have probably never heard of including Findory that are applying filtering technology to the news, which I suppose is necessary if you have figured out how to set up your RSS reader and therefore are overwhelmed by a deluge of news stories.