Internet and the shared experience.

With all these social networks that are heavily customizable, targetted advertising, and personalization of content feeds, the shared experience of the internet is becoming less and less apparent.

When you log into a system, the appearance is constructed on the fly based on your preferences, settings, and permissions. If you are an "admin" you get different buttons and layouts than a "public user" and again different from a "member" on an increasing number of sites.

At one time, when you went to any website, you could call someone and get them to look at the same site, and you'd both see the same colors, same ads, same content.

Now, with feed aggregation, embedding, and even inline comments and ads, you could even be watching the same youtube video but have entirely different contexts and popup messages than someone else viewing the same video somewhere else.

Moreover, with Google's promotion and web history tools, not to mention international filters, search results differ depending on who you specifically are, so the idea of calling someone and saying "Hey...google painted squirrell and check out the third result" will no longer work.

How important is the context to a message? What difference does it make if my friend and I watch the "Simpsons" and my TV in the kitchen is 13" and someone else watches it on a 72" Flat screen in their livingroom?

I think these are important considerations for the design and evolution of rich web applications, because shared experience is what makes us able to relate to each other. Without it, in all our "connectedness" we become increasingly "disconnected".