Wouldn’t it be great when you open your favorite site it already shows you the things that you really like or are interested in,  Instead of wasting your time searching through hundreds of articles trying to find the right one?  Personalized trends are becoming big in the online realm these days, as more are actually trying to give subscribers what they want for a more pleasurable experience.

News360’s app for iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7, Android phone, the BlackBerry Playbook and Android tablet is quite a big hit as it allows you to personalize your news by picking the top 5-10 topics that you mostly search on out of the 700,000 different entities known to the News360 semantic engine.  It also allows you to edit your interests that are collated through various sites.  And it also aggregates news from multiple news outlets, allowing you to move from one story to another for a well-rounded understanding of the topic being reported.  And as the name implies, it allows a 360° view of news: images that you can swipe left or right.

Facebook has also incorporated personalization in their news feed as they quietly launched the Aggregated Topic Clusters that sort and display news stories by subject.  Aside from clustering related topics, a mere mentioning of a topic, without tagging, will also include it in the aggregation.  The update uses a Natural Processing Language that cross-matches words in your status to others.  Kind of like auto-tagging.  No wonder Anonymous is threatening to bring the site down, it always raises privacy concerns amongst users.

Facebook is also looking into adding a ‘want’ and ‘need’ button in addition to their ‘like’ button that allows Facebook to push advertisements based on your likes, wants, or needs.

AOL has also jumped on board as they released Editions, a personalized iPad magazine that is set to deliver a unique and beautiful reading experience customized for each individual user.  There are a total of 15 topic sections to choose from, including Design, Tech, Business, Family, Health & Fitness, Sports, Entertainment and Travel.  These sections can be edited to showcase your favorite companies, teams, celebrities, brands etc. as well as allowing local news access.  Editions also features a calendar that you can sync to Facebook and iCal to display upcoming events and birthdays.