Today I discovered APML(new window) and it’s changed everything.

Two years ago, I was part of the group that won Reboot, the BBC homepage redesign competition. Our principle feature was a filter with three settings, You, BBC and everyone else.

When set to ‘Everyone Else’ all content was filtered to display content preferred by the user community. Set to ‘You’ it displayed content that matched your preferred content (pulling from Last.fm/Delicious/Amazon/Sky + viewing etc). Set to ‘BBC’ it filtered content based on what the BBC prefered you to view.

At the time I had no idea how that would ever be implemented, it seemed a long way off but the concept was valid. If only we had some way to pull all that your personal data together and distribute to other services.

Then today I watched the DataPortability video and discovered APML.

Designed correctly (with privacy clearly the big issue) APML will become the enabler for features like the BBC slider. Login with you Open ID, agree to share your data, then the site pulls what it wants from your profile, contextualizing content, navigation, language, advertising, in principle providing completely personalised experience for every user. That’s a big, big step.