The Web is Big Business

Abstract

As has been explained in the paper “A Survey of Communications and Collaborative Web Technologies” in this special issue the web started as a more or less one-way information system, allowing engineers at CERN to share new results in physics world-wide easily. As it developed, it became more and more a two-way (or more precisely a multi-way) communication tool, allowing to collaboratively work in many ways. This has, as it has been described in the aforementioned paper, not just changed how information is created and provided easy ways of communication, but has also allowed the growth of social networks as first tools to tie together the power of brains, changing how we work, think, do research, form new circles of people we are interested in. This on its own would have been a major change in how society works, yet it turned out soon that the technologies available would allow to set up completely new business models, and threaten some existing ones. Among the hundreds of million applications found on the web today, many set up to make money, or at least pay for themselves by providing excellent ways of advertisements. There is no person who could know all the applications available on the web, and there is no way to even list a tiny percentage of them. However, what we are trying in this paper is to classify applications and discuss their commercial or societal impact.