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.

If we look back in history , we will find that much before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. ICQ could have been Facebook or Twitter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its status as a social pioneer but now with it’s new client, ICQ is getting back to what it was about all the way from the beginning – a place to interact with your friends everywhere. Everybody Everywhere is after all ICQ’s slogan and being an ICQ veteran myself, I am very excited to announce the launch of the new ICQ 7.

ICQ 7 is a client that brings together all your social interactions from across the Web. Instead of having to open a few different pages and applications to get my friends’ status updates on Facebook, to read tweets of my favorite people and to follow what’s happening on other sites as well such as Youtube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious.  ICQ 7 allows me to use one personal communication tool to integrate all my online social activities.  I am able to syndicate my updates to all of my social networks with a single click and get status updates & tweets from all my friends in my networks in one single platform.

ICQ 7 enables real-time updates from content sharing sites and top social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg and Delicious and will soon announce the integration of local social networks. Found side by side with the ICQ Contact List, users can find a separate tab of real time feeds and updates from their friends from their various social networks. Users will no longer need to open up a new browser and log in to separate networks that they’re members of each time they want to comment on their friend’s updates. From now on, consider ICQ to be your social networks’ one-stop-shop no longer will I need to search for content on different platforms – the content finds me.  ICQ 7′s interface is also improved with software that is fully compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 7.

My Status: Status updates I make on ICQ can be automatically posted in my other supported networks as well.  I can also easily share pictures and links.

Feeds from Friends: Updates made by user’s friends on leading social networks and content sharing sites appear in real time in the “Feeds from Friends” tab on the contact list.  The user can comment on these updates directly from his/her ICQ and the comment will appear also in the relevant social network/site.  ICQ users can see updates from all their friends in the various social networks – not just from friends that have ICQ.

My Box: The “My Box” tab on the ICQ Contact List is the place where ICQ users get all notifications of their personal online activity – who commented on my status and in which site, who liked the photos I uploaded, etc.

New User Profile: ICQ 7 presents a more enhanced user profile – both within the client and on the Website.  The user profile is the place where users can display who they are by sharing pictures and personal updates on their page.  The new user profile is now offered in color schemes that are fully customizable to suit the user’s mood. Additionally, the new user profile allows ICQ users to view their friends’ contact lists and add new people to their own contact list, thereby increasing their circle of friends.

Picture-Sharing Tool: A new, quick and fun application for sharing pictures with friends:

Faster, Lighter: ICQ 7 performance has been vastly improved with installation time reduced by nearly 50% and requested space for installation reduced approximately by 30%.

ICQ 7 offers a Social Messaging client that enables quick and easy communication friends from across networks, ability to view real-time updates from: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg and Delicious. ICQ’s Managing Director, Eliav Moshe, says:

“ICQ 7 brings Social Messaging into play, integrating users’ online social world with their personal communication tool.  The new version answers users’ needs for a quick and easy communication tool that also helps you be up to date with everything that’s going on in multiple social networks and content sharing sites.  With a loyal community of over 42 million users worldwide, we are working on the upcoming integration of local social networks into ICQ 7 as well.”

It is only fitting that the company that was the pioneer of the Web 2.0 era has now integrated this Web 2.0 world into one manageable space in the best possible manner.  Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. In my opinion it offers the best solution we have today for one platform which integrates all my social interactions into one convenient platform.

Become an ICQ fan on Facebook

Check out their Twitter

(Disclosure: Blonde 2.0 is ICQ’s social media firm)

10. May Google Wave turns out to be a lot more convincing than what I’ve seen so far

9. May people stop giving relevance to terms like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and start giving relevance to what those terms mean

8. May advertisers finally admit the fact that that they cannot do without social media playing an integral part in their campaigns

7. May Web entrepreneurs start thinking more about the type of Web tools that people have a need for rather than being so concerned about replicating what’s already a huge success

6. May information on the Web really lives up to the dream and starts finding us instead of us needing to search for it

5. May people begin to understand that conversational marketing is about having a dialogue with people and not about who had the best monologue

4. May data portability between various platforms become more simple and efficient

3. May bloggers finally get the respect they deserve from the community

2. May email turn to twitter – each mail cannot be longer than 140 characters (that’s including attachments)

1. May more tools focusing on citizen journalism and real time updating services enable us all to be more aware of what’s happening in the world around us and bring us all closer together

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy 2010. I hope that at least a few wishes in each of our lists come true in the upcoming year.

Image credit: Oliver Widder

Once upon a time to attain the level of (positive) fame and recognition that Susan Boyle now enjoys you would have had to be a president or a movie star. Now an anonymous, middle aged, Scottish spinster who possesses a stunning voice is arguably one of the most famous people on the planet.

The first and easiest argument to be made is that Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and the rest of the Briton’s Got Talent crew have brought reality TV to a new level of audience manipulation. However, this argument doesn’t hold up when you look back at previous videos such as Connie the wonder kid and Paul Potts the unlikely opera tenor. The production value in those videos is nearly identical to those in the Susan Boyle video and the contestants just as unlikely (I would argue that Paul Potts was an even bigger surprise) winners as Boyle.

So what has changed in the last two years?  The sharing tools available to all of us. In 2007 I wrote a post about “The New Tribalism”, influenced by Stowe Boyd’s explanation of how Web 2.0 tools help online communities form “tribes” of people around the same vertical. Now with increasingly powerful sites for link sharing such as Digg, Facebook and especially Twitter (with is its ability to find and display trending topics), these tools have given the Web the power to accelerate the exposure received by a single event far faster than ever before. These tools will only get more and more powerful as time passes, crossing tribes, communities, networks and entire countries with increasing speed. In the future it will only take 15 minutes to get your 15 minutes of fame.

So I’ve decided to make a series of lists of Web 2.0 apps that stand out from the rest by the fact that I actually use them. Daily. The first list is of productivity apps, the ones that help me get my work done every day, in alphabetical order:

Box.net
Box.net really does one thing very well, it lets me store and organize my files online. I can access everything no matter where I am and share specific files and folders with other people. Then has a really cool application platform that allows me to use services like Zoho and PicniK to edit my files. This is the future of file storage. 

Social Text
SocialText is a collaboration that provides Wiki’s, enterprise level social networking, a dashboard that provides a personalized interface for people and teams to manage attention and SocialText signals which acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it to keep in touch at AdHocnium.

Prezi
Prezi is not just another online slideshow (there are many of those)  Prezi is a new way of thinking; Prezi allows anyone who can sketch an idea on a napkin to create and perform stunning non-linear presentations with relations, zooming into details, and adjusting to the time left without the need to skip slides. I love Prezi. (Uptime could be better though)

WordPress
WordPress powers the blog you’re reading now and millions of other blogs, it is hands down the best blogging platform out there and it also has the best extensions; their Akismet spam comment blocking service alone saves me every day – without it I would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches at least 100 spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, aims to replace Microsoft Office, I will admit to still using office but when I’m on the go, or just checking something in Box.net, Zoho is awesome. The feature list is still lacking when compared to the heavy Microsoft version, but it’s free and I can also collaborate with others on documents.

What is your favorite Web 2.0 productivity app?