Laander

New possibilities and initiatives in the digital world have exploded during recent years, and the development doesn’t seem to stop for anything - just consider the monstrous spectrum of different online services that have launched within last decade or two:

• Social networking services: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace
• Communication and publishing platforms: Wordpress/Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter
• Social life aggregators: FriendFeed, Profilactic, Lifestrea.ms
• Social bookmarking and news: del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon
• Information search and lookup: (inevitable) Google,  Wikipedia, Dictionary.com
• Personal organization and communication: Gmail, MobileMe and so forth (Hotmail, Exchange, Yahoomail etc.)
• Video and photo sharing: Flickr, YouTube, Imageshack
• Online shopping: eBay, Amazon, Pricerunner
• Services to centralize the above (online desktops if you will): iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes

This is only to mention a few - check out Webware’s top 100 list for an awesome overview of current high-flyers. People I know, will recon that I love visualization. Statistics, workflows, networks, you name it, everything is so much more interesting when it’s visualized in a diagram of some sort. So:

Diagram picturing popular web apps 2008, categorized after purpose

I’ll claim that all of the mentioned web apps serves either one or multiple of the following three purposes: socialize, organize and/or informatize (self-made up word, but it needed to end with -ize :-)). Some will overlap, others will not quite fit any, but these are the major needs that web apps will to try to cover.

During the recent years, the development seem to have accelerated heavily, especially at the social aspects of digital online life. Actually, by the time I have published this post, plenty of new services have already surfaced, spreading like a steppe fire. Besides the many new services, a whole deal of new platforms, devices and technologies takes the services to a whole new level and makes the possibilities almost endless. Just consider digital life in terms of: mobility, accessability, reliability, compatibility, extensibility and usability - all undergone tremendous advancement. Simply put, the possibilites have never been as intriguing as now.

Now, what I find the most interesting is how we make use of all the possibilities presented to us. This is the first post in a series, where emphasis will be on this particular topic: how to get the most out of the digital revolution currently taking place..