Yesterday I clicked on Eli Parisers site moveon.org and right away I was surprised that the AddThis plugin under the headline story offered facebook, email, twitter AND meinVZ (one of germanys biggest social networking sites)

I asked a friend in the states to visit moveon.org. For him the plugin offered facebook / email / twitter and google and of course no MeinVZ for the Americans.

Well of course this isn’t really the kind of personalization that Eli Pariser is telling us to watch out for. In my opinion it is a rather useful personalization of technology and not a personalization of information. But I was sure that it wasn’t on Elis mind that this is actually happening. Since Eli always points out that the filterbubble is invisible I thought it is an excelent little example of how INVISIBLE the filter bubble actually is and how easy people can contribute to it. So I contacted him and told him about it.

Eli Parisers reply to my mail

It’s a good catch — I wasn’t aware that AddThis was doing that. In the long run, we’re hoping to move away from that plugin for a number of reasons, but it’s fine to point out if you’d like — it does underscore the point that one can miss this happening under one’s own nose.