Web-connected grocery store “VIP” cards may track customer spending as they do today: every time you scan your customer card, your purchases are added to a massive database that grocery stores use to guide their stocking choices. In exchange for your data, the stores offer you discounts on selected products. Soon with Web-enhanced shopping, stores will be able to offer you specific promotions based on your particular purchasing history, and in real time (as illustrated above). This will give shoppers more incentive to sign up for VIP programs and give retailers more flexibility and variety with discounts, sales and other promotions.

Search engines—and the whole concept of search itself—will remain in flux as personalization becomes more commonplace. Currently, the major search engines are adapting to this by offering different takes on personalized search results, based on user-specific browsing history.

Google also hopes to leverage your social network connections to deliver results from people you already know.

OverviewThe overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones. Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them. Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Among those who get news online, 75% get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% share links to news with others via those means.

the study reveals that three fourths of the people (75%) who find news online get it either forwarded through e-mail or posts on social networking sites, and half of them (52%) forward the news through those means.

59% of those surveyed get news from a combination of online and offline sources.

In fact, nearly half of Americans (46%) claim they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. And while TV is still the biggest source of news (78% of Americans say they get news from a local TV station), Internet sits at second place (61% of users get news online)

the rate at which the connection can increase actually decreases. Did that make sense? Unless your friends are constantly questioning you or keeping tabs on you, it’s going to take a lot longer to make deeper connections the more your network grows.

SPONSORED BY: placeAd2(commercialNode,'88x31|5',false,''); Google’s Orwell Moment On the Web, privacy has its price. &nbsp; TECHNOLOGY How Well Do You Know Google? Can you pass this trivia test—without looking up the answers on you-know-what? &nbsp; By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK Published Feb&nbsp;17, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010 Share: Facebook Digg (5) Tweet LinkedIn newsweek:http://www.newsweek.com/id/233773Buzz up!&nbsp;(8) Tools: 19 Post Your Comment Print Email NWK.widget.EmailArticle.init(); SPONSORED BY placeAd2('printthis','88x31',false,''); &nbsp; Email To A Friend Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link. Your Email Address Recipient's Email Address Separate multiple addresses with commas SPONSORED BY &nbsp; Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking features to its popular Gmail system. The service is called Buzz, and within hours of its release, people were howling about privacy issues—because, in its original form, Buzz showed everyone the list of people you e-mail most frequently. Even people who weren't cheating on their spouses or secretly applying for new jobs found this a little unnerving. SUBSCRIBE <script languag

The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.

These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of "monetizing" our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the "social norm," as Facebook puts it—so that what we're giving up doesn't seem so valuable.

A less quantifiable statistic that may also have impacted the rise of mobile social networking to the point where it has surpassed desktop-based social networking is the fact that it's an activity that taps into how people - normal, everyday people - go about their lives.