'Everything Personal, Not Just Business': Improving User Experience Through Rule-based Service Customization

One main reason for the tremendous success of the Web is that it managed -- since its early days -- to establish a personalized relationship with its user. Wasn't the "personal homepage", the first Web killer app? At this point almost all web portals and web-based services offer some form of customization, from letting the end-user select what content to display and how, to storing end-user values (e.g., credit card information) to simplify future interactions, to providing alerts based on end-user requests. With the next revolution of the web based on the web service paradigm, will the infrastructure in place now be sufficient for customizing/personalizing the web services of the future? This short paper argues that the answer is a strong NO, and introduces an infrastructure that will be sufficient.