Amazon.com’s “Your Store” — Last month, Amazon.com launched Your Store, a personalized Web page that welcomes you by name and features what Amazon’s customer profiling figures will be your favorite selections from stores throughout the Amazon Web site.

Features include, as before, suggestions for new books or other products based on previous purchases, products the customer rated in past visits, and areas of the Web site that the customer marked as favorites.

Insight: According to Amazon, the value-add offered by Your Store is that it brings these disparate elements together on a single page, allowing users to tailor the areas or add or delete them.

   Classmates.com — Each September, hundreds of thousands of new “communities” take shape in classrooms across America, from kindergarten to high school, and in colleges and universities across academia. By keeping tabs on those classmates as well as military personnel, Renton’s-based Classmates.com has succeeded in creating the Web’s single largest subscription service business model, a company that can claim more subscribers than the Wall Street Journal or Consumer Reports. They currently have 24 million members (each day 600,000 to 100,000 new memberships are formed. Roughly 6.23 percent of those or 1.4 million are paying annual subscribers.

Insight: What’s remarkable is that all the content on Classmates is member generated. Members report themselves that their E-mail changed, that they graduated from such-and-such a place, or that they served in the Navy on this particular ship at this time period. Very soon it will be “I worked at IBM in Munich in 1984.” That kind of specific location and time element is the critical piece of information that makes it all work.

   AllRecipes.com — They have no magazine, no paid advertising, no cable TV channel, no catalogue — yet they managed to attract 2.2 million unique visitors in December 2000. The secret ingredient is word-of-mouth. Like Classmates.com, the users contribute the content — recipes — rating and reviewing them.

Highly-rated recipes make the Top Ten list. One of the our users’ favorite features is “scaling.” You can scale the recipe up to feed 40 to 50 people, and mathematical algorithms will make sure you get the same result. Insight: Their growth has been viral. On average, each visitors is emailing recipes to seven other people!

   RealArcade — RealNetwork’s RealArcade Group is out to change the way we think about buying and playing games online. Early results would indicate their game plan is a winning one. You can pay for and download a PC game for less than the same shrink-wrapped version at the local software store. In total, more than 7 million games have been downloaded over the past eighteen months. Can you say “new game sales and distribution model”?

Insight: In fact, RealArcade is much more than the world’s up-and-coming biggest game store. It’s also the engine of a complete online gaming system that can help users download, install and manage their game play. If you don’t have the right CD card, it will warn you before you download the game. Same with CPU speed or CPU memory. You’ll know before you try and play the game.

RealArcade also maintains a complete database of every game that it finds on your computer so it can manage and actually launch all those games. Imagine that.