Data and context makes a comeback

Do you ever visit a friend’s house and find yourself surprised at how different their Netflix queue looks than yours? Or worry about the breaking down of a shared reality amid an increasingly fractured media landscape?

As more of our digital experiences become mediated by personalization algorithms and fandoms built around individual content creators, I believe there’s an opportunity in 2025 for information services that give people back a sense of context and overview.

Data will play a key part. During the recent U.S. election, many people highlighted the well-documented partisan gaps in our perception of inflation and the economy. The antidote to this perception gap is actual data about the economy’s performance — provided it’s presented in a way that makes it interesting, easy to understand, and relevant to people’s interests.

Data and context not only informs — it empowers us to make better decisions. These could be as big as economic policy, or as small as everyday decisions on what TV shows to watch, what to eat, or where to go on vacation.

At Yahoo, we’re setting out to build exactly these types of data services: guides that draw on a variety of metrics to help you situate yourself, navigate different walled-garden media spaces, and discover things beyond what algorithms understand to be in your interest graph. These could include:

• Helping people discover which restaurants are creating buzz on social media
• Helping people understand how inflation is hitting their grocery bill
• Helping people see which conversations are spreading across Bluesky/X/Reddit

We believe contextual data is complementary, not mutually exclusive, to personalized recommendations. Being able to see a ranking of the most-discussed TV shows alongside a list of shows most relevant to your interests only makes both lists more interesting.

In the quest to remove friction from our everyday lives, we’ve designed and adopted digital products that narrow our field of vision and traded exploration for convenience. In 2025, it’s time for products that use data to help us lift our heads up a little and scan the horizon.