Visualizing the Big Players in the Internet Economy

An article by Noam Fixler

Post written by Noam Fixler

As the big players of the Internet economy fight for control over the market, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 summit team decided to portray these battles on a map. Last year they created a map that showcases the players in our network economy, gathered around various territories that represent the Web 2.0′s Points of Control. These ‘points of control’ include “Union of Social Networks“, “Land of Search“, “Kingdom of E-commerce“, “The Platform Plateau” and a couple more. The key players – Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo, to name a few – are scattered all over the map, on their relevant point(s) of control.

A year later, as we approach the 2011 Web 2.0 summit it seems that now more than ever data is the key factor in the game. In the war over ‘points of control’ the player who will leverage the data best to his advantage will win. And it’s with this insight in mind that Battelle and O’reilly decided to add another layer to the map: The data layer.

So what is the new data layer?

The data layer demonstrates the size and control of companies in different kinds of data. Only the top eight players in the Internet economy – as the creators see it – are featured in this layer: Amazon, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo. The players are placed in their main point of control.

The data types are:

Purchase Data: Information about who buys what, who almost buys what (data gathered from shopping carts that were created but then abandoned), when they buy it and in what context.

Search Data: Information about intentions – query data, path from query data, “intent” data, and many more search signals.

Social Data: Information about the social graph, identity data and how people interact inside their graphs.

Interest Data: Information about “the interest graph” – declarations of what people are interested in. It’s related to content, but it’s not just content consumption. It includes active production of interest data-points, like tweets, status updates and check-ins.

Location Data: Information about where people are, how often they are there, what apps they use in location context, and who else is there and when.

Content Data: Information about who reads/watches/consumes what, when, and in what patterns.

Wildcard Data: Information that is uncategorized, but could have huge implications.

Each type of data has a different type of building to represent it, and each building will only be as high as the strength of that company is in that type of data. So basically, in the data layer you will get a picture of eight little cities, each city representing one of the big players, and the buildings in the city representing the different types of data.

So of course, sometimes trying to visualize things has its disadvantages. Battelle and O’reilly want to keep the data layer simple so we only get to see eight companies on the map, which is far from the full picture. However, the new data layer of web 2.0 map is definitely something worth a look, and I’m waiting to see what layer they will add on next year.

See the full Web 2.0 map here.

Embed the data layer using this code.

Noam is a Planner and Community Manager at Blonde 2.0.