Difference between revisions of "256: Online Communities"
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* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance). | * ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance). | ||
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. | * ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like. | ||
| − | * ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see [ | + | * ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Eternal September]) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days. |
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by Myspace and, now, Facebook. | * ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by Myspace and, now, Facebook. | ||
* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site from 1999. | * ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site from 1999. | ||
Revision as of 02:28, 15 December 2013
| Online Communities |
 Title text: I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?' |
Explanation
|
This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Practically empty If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at 802: Online Communities 2. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the Compass-Rose-Shaped Island points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia
Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".
Transcript
- [Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
- Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.
- [Land Area Labels:]
- The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
- AOL, Reunion dot com,
- Classmates dot com,
- E-harmony,
- Faceparty,
- QWGHLM,
- Yahoo Games,
- Mountains of Web 1.0,
- The Lonely Island,
- MySpace,
- Attractive MySpace Pages,
- The Series of Tubes,
- Myspace Bands,
- WOW,
- Lineage,
- Second Life,
- Third Life,
- UO,
- EQ,
- FPXI,
- 2channel,
- 4chan,
- LJ,
- Xanga,
- Orkut,
- Cyworld,
- Blurty,
- OK Cupid,
- Facebook,
- Piczo,
- The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
- Broadcaster,
- Flickr,
- Last.fm,
- DeviantArt,
- Isle of Slash,
- Numa,
- Digg,
- Fark,
- Reddit,
- Your Base,
- Soviet Russia,
- (slashdot),
- Spaaarta (YTMND),
- StumbleUpon,
- Del.icio.us,
- The Blogipelago,
- Sulawesi,
- Technocrati,
- BoingBoing,
- Huntingdon Post,
- Gays of Web 2.0,
- The Wikipedia project,
- MIT,
- Engadget,
- Gizmodo,
- Usenet,
- XY Singles,
- MAKE Blog,
- IRC Isles,
- Sourceforge.
- [Sea Area Labels:]
- NOOB Sea,
- Gulf of YouTube,
- Bay of Angst,
- Sea of Culture,
- Ocean of Subculture,
- P2P Shoals,
- Straits of Web 2.0,
- Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
- Bay of Trolls,
- Viral Straits,
- Sea of Memes,
- The Wet Sea Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress
Notes
|
|
This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Please include the reason why this explanation is incomplete, like this: {{incomplete|reason}}If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
Compass Rose-shaped Island
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamopus for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.
The Icy North
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
- Yahoo! was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
- Windows Live, particularly Windows Live Messenger, used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
- AOL was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see Eternal September) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the Noob Sea south of AOL. The Chat Rooms nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
- Friendster: While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by Myspace and, now, Facebook.
- Faceparty A UK social media site from 1999.
- Classmates.com, Reunion.com Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
Dating sites (Northwest costal regions)
Social Media (West)
The Blogipelago (Southwest)
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.
Sea of Culture (Central region)
Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content
User-created content and discussions (Southeast)
Sites such as Wikipedia and chat programs such as IRC.
Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures".
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.
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I'm gonna try and put together some sort of explanation at all for this one. A couple of things I could use help on in terms of location if people want to chip in: series of tubes within myspace; the Icy North; the islands bounded by the Ocean of Subculture, Sea of Memes, and P2P Shoals; and the location of some of the tiny islands around the map (e.g. why is the Lonely Island near friendster, Google's Volcano Fortress off the IRC Isles, etc.). Thanks in advance!! Amurfalcon (talk) 20:30, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
- I've found Googling some of the more obscure things and half-readable things helps a lot. It's how I got Xu Jinglei. 141.101.99.219 17:03, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
The Lonely Island may be a reference to the comedy band of the same name. Shortly before this map was made they blew up after appearing on SNL. I do not know if this is relevant to its location on the map. CloverOtsworth (talk) 00:03, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
Can someone remove that stray line break before "A larger version..."? It irks me and I don't know how to get rid of it.
- bay of trolls
Might this be a reference to bay of pigs? 173.245.48.135 03:58, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
- Possibly, but, well, it'd be rather speculative to include it, and there's lots of other "Bay of X" places, e.g. Bay of Fundy. 141.101.99.235 05:46, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
- Map of the Internet
I don't know if or how much this art was inspired by this comic, but if you like 256 you'll love the Map of the Internet. — tbc (talk) 16:14, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
"World of Warcraft ... based on a previously-existing RPG series" i'm not sure about this statement. The first thing that most people think about would be Warcraft but that's not an RPG series (they are strategy games) unless we are considering it so for the minimal RPG elements in Warcraft 3. Perhaps it's referencing an other series (maybe Diablo) or I'm missing something and since i'm far from an expert in either WOW or xkcd i'll let someone else decide if it should be changed (a possible minimal change would be changing "RPG series" to either "game series" or "video game series"). 188.114.111.125 07:49, 5 November 2016 (UTC)
There's no explanation of the "anthropomorphic dragons" bit. I mean, I'm sure many of us know what it means (wink wonk), but some may be confused. 108.162.246.33 03:31, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
what is a one-syllable way to say "practical" or "practicals"? New editor (talk) 07:05, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- As a noun? I suppose "prop(s)" fits that ("a practical effect", as supposed to a special one, for something in a movie scene). Or "skill", in context of what a practical ability is. Or "test" (i.e. a "practical exam"), if you think "trial" is >1 syllable (I say 1.5!)... As a non-noun, never pluralised in any context I can think of and I'm short of 1-syllable answers, but I'm sure a visit to a dictionary+thesaurus site would help greatly. But I'm now wondering why anyone even asked this question here... Perhaps I need to reread the page for long-forgotten context? 172.70.162.5 09:51, 5 April 2022 (UTC) - addendum: Ahah! The compass rose! Lemme think more about the word. Or let others find your question, equipped with an innately more at hand answer... - additional addendum: it refers to those who "can", maybe? The "Cans", with the Intellectuals opposite being more like the "Coulds", rather than dimetrically Cannots. The 1S limit is rather restrictive. Can't even role out "able(rs)", or the like. But I presume you have singly-short-style names for the othe three (or seven?) points of the rose... Have fun. Hope you get better ideas from the next editor! -- ~sameIP~~slightlylater~
A couple of the explanations given for certain sites seem a little outdated, for example, yahoo no longer owns Tumblr and (I think?) Friendster is defunct now.
