I was thinking about the decentralization of everything yesterday and in particular I was curious about the Internet. I wanted to see what are the fundamental uses of the WWW. After considering the main ways that consumers and firms interact with this massive communications medium and database, I think I have unraveled it down to the following three fundamental uses.
- Goods. That is, the Internet allows us to interface with the physical world to purchase, sell and exchange goods. For example, Amazon and various other marketplaces and auction sites allow buyers and sellers to post their goods in exchange for money. In this sense, it replaces or augments traditional marketplaces such as a market squares and retail shops. This also includes physical services performed such as fetching a car ride.
- Services. This is broad enough to be separated from the goods use above. Services include those uses that we can perform online to help our lives or bring us satisfaction. These are typically delivered via applications either through a browser, a fat client (e.g. MS Outlook) or a smartphone/tablet (i.e. native apps). This can include online calendar and booking apps, gaming, gambling, and various communications methods such as email, Skype, Slack, etc. Think of services as what you can do online directly rather than in the physical world.
- Information. By far this is the largest use on average of the Internet. Since pretty much all of human knowledge is stored online in a massive, distributed database, it poses one of the greatest uses for people. This information encompasses everything from blogs, newsletters, videos, music, documents, and others. In a word, content.
Now having listed the three fundamental uses, these are not mutually exclusive. For example, using a service like Uber actually spans all three to some degree. Using the Uber service to hail a ride would bring you first to their application which runs on your smartphone (example of #2). Once the ride is confirmed you can track via the map display where the driver is in relation to your location (example of #3). Once the drivers arrives and takes you to your destination, your service is complete (example of #1).
So what do you think? Are there any other fundamental uses that I have missed which would not fall within the three categories listed?