In my last entry I laid out a difference between websites and web services: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. To clarify that point, and bring out a few other things Im going to list some websites and explain which model they fit under:
Wikipedia: Web 1.0. Wikipedia is cited as a "new media revolutionary" changing the way the publishing industry and media work. It may be. But its also a pretty clear web 1.0 company. Its a website you visit to find information. You go, find your Romanian castle information read it and leave. Sure you can change that information, improve it a little, but in the end all youre doing is making the page slightly better for the next random person who comes across it.
Flickr: Hybrid. Flickr is interesting because it shows how a web 2.0 company can use those assets to drive a web 1.0 business. Flickr has at its core a complete web 2.0 service
: Users can upload pictures, display them, and edit them all through a comprehensive set of APIs. A flickr user can get by as a heavy user of the system and only visit the flickr.com for the initial sign up. But all of that web 2.0 activity builds up a huge store of web 1.0 value. Thousands of pages of content to be consumed by traditional web surfers. The two ideas working together provide flickr with two almost separate user bases: Heavy users who may not navigate the site much at all and the general public looking for cute pictures of puppies.
Dodgeball: Web 2.0. Dodge ball is completely useless to the wandering surfer, except as an exercise in voyeurism. It is a service built on sms and web technologies that allows people to communicate via sms location information to groups of friends. Its not a website, in that visiting the dodgeball.com doesnt yield you anything but marketing information. But its a webservice in that it provides a tool built over web infrastructure
.
Given those three examples Id like to throw some more names out there, leave a comment for anything you think I got totally wrong, along with why:
