“Web technology is social.”
Posted on January 28, 2008
Reading this article over at the Guardian, I started wondering if websites are analogous to towns, cities, and other physical places.
Places like Facebook and MySpace seem like good metaphors for cities. A few million inhabitants of various interests, ages, races, backgrounds, etc, all in one “location”. Joining a site is similar to moving to a new city. You move in, get your space organized, do a little decorating, and make friends.
Search sites like Google might be thought of as airports. While they might be destinations in and of themselves, most people use them as a launching point to go somewhere else.
A site like mine might be thought of as a house in the middle of nowhere (Offtopic: “the middle of nowhere” is a great example of formulaic language). There are a few visitors from time to time, and sometimes people will look at it as they drive by (e.g. it appeared in their search results).
Another analogy for this site might be to think of it as an apartment and all of the other sites on the same server are in the same apartment building. In this case, the webhost might be thought of as a city or town, except I don’t think there is a lot of interaction between sites based on which host we’re with or which server we’re on.
Just an idle thought while browsing the web.
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