Venn Diagram of the Web
For some weird reason, this weekend my brain started drawing a diagram of functions on the web. I think it had to do with contemplating the full usefulness of tools like Weebly that let you make a quick and dirty site. I know that to a lot of people “Content is King,” but the king surely isn’t the whole kingdom. So I started wondering how things play out functionally on the web:
What I found is that there seem to be four major functional areas.
- Content
- Transactions
- Communication
- Networking
Content is content. There is text, images, photos, videos, data… the kind of stuff that goes in and stays. It’s the stuff that you C(reate)R(ead)U(pdate)D(elete) from time-to-time. Within content, there are two kinds: Flat and Relational. Flat is stuff like articles or photos that are of value on their own, or in one-dimensional groups. Relational is stuff that is strongly categorized, hierarchical or inter-related, like a product catalog for light bulbs. Somewhere in between those two you get meta-data, which is the stuff that gives those flat pieces of content some dimension. It helps them relate to eachother, but not in the strong integrity of a database.
Transactions are when stuff is exchanged. Online banking is pretty much a matter of shifting money from here to there. yes, there is relational data in there, but the data itself is used for shifting money (or value, or whatever) back and forth, and isn’t of much value on its own.
Communication is the digitization of what we’ve done for thousands of years. The media we use are pretty few in this arena, and little by little they’re becoming more cross-functional like Skype or gtalk. The webmail I refer to means any in-site asynchronous threaded dialog. In some cases, this is public discussion like a forum, in others it’s private messaging. By alternative, the uni-directional asynchronous communication is comments - either to blogs or to MySpace pages, or what have you.
The newcomer to the game is Networking. It’s pretty simple and straightforward, but it’s what’s given the Web it’s little “2.0″ when it comes to functionality. There are sites out there that are either all-purpose, wide-open, no-limits networking (like MySpace or Friendster), and there are the sites at the other end of the spectrum: very narrow and focused, even walled off (aSmallWorld). What MySpace has done in this arena moreso than anyone else is embrace content. Instead of just saying “yeah, she’s my friend,” it lets users express their individuality through content - videos, photos, blogs, music, … - with little limit. Maybe that’s why they’re the big one 
.
So, where’s Google in all this? They did something smart. They built a second-level on to this diagram. They said “Let’s organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They started out by making it possible to get at anything in the Content bubble. Now they’ve tip-toed into every piece of this diagram. Communications - check. Transactions - check. Content - check. Networking - er, um - check. No wonder they’re worth Goo-gillions. Yahoo’s working on the same thing, albeit a little behind. Others have carved out little niches, like Indeed with job listings and this new Wikipedia search engine.
Is this everything? Absolutely not. This is just version 0.1, off the top of my head. Why’d I do it? So I could sleep at night. What is this good for? It’s a lot easier to take over the world if you have a map.