That is how I perceive Internet. Further and deeper than reading news; consuming videos, games; communicating real-time…Nope, I only think they are marginal productivity improvements in our lives, respectively over reading hardcopy newspapers and magazines; watching DVDs, playing board games and talking on the phone, or receiving postal mail and facsmile. The essence of the internet is in the potential of open, costless, effective collaboration. The earliest form of open collaboration I used on the net departs back to my high school years in Iskenderun, Hatay -my micro hometown in Turkey-, when I reviewed user comments and ratings on Imdb’s movie pages. Although being very primitive and strictly one-way, it really helped a lot on saving time (and money) from unnecessary movies and really spot the better ones.

Lately, the web pioneers gained pace in harvesting the potential of collaboration in several ways. Amazon.com helped shoppers with suggestions from other shoppers who bought similar or same items. Pandora’s algorithm analyzed users’ music listening patterns and generated suggestions for each and every user, based on their recent activity. StumbleUpon built a highly-customized pathway into the borderless websphere, in which you are sent to websites related to your interests and other users’ votes, which you wouldn’t have found by yourself.

As said, e-mails and VoIPs are just marginal improvements over what we already had, with side benefits of cost-saving and convenience. But there are other unique collaboration methods that arose with the foundation of web and its collaboration potential. There are wikis, where users can collectively build knowledge by subject and update it, without any institutional moderation. There are forums where users can share thoughts and learn from each other, based on posting messages by subject. There are blogs, in which users each assume the role of a writer/journalist (just like me here) and share his/her thoughts with the reader universe, and the complimentary RSS makes the world for reader such easier so that they can see each and every update in any blog in one single browser window, instead of visiting one. This development further strengthened the vision of citizen journalism, which was not more than fan e-mails sent to respective newspapers with a slight hope of getting noticed or read, let alone being published.

Back to ratings, and there is ebay’s seller/buyer ratings which makes you feel easy in your purchase and there is getafreelancer.com which erases geographical borders for all your standardizable work need (programming, web design, drawing, text writing…).

There are infinite number of successful social networking sites, where you ‘connect’ with similar souls (be it in music, politics, gaming, health, profession…) and make friends, learn and teach new things.

Among all, there are niche but successful collaboration harvesters like Innocentive, in which scientific-solution seekers (companies & institutions) meet solution providers (students, lecturers, researchers from all over the world) to work on a project and come up with solutions, along with project-based cash incentives. Now tell me, isn’t it highly-outsourced R&D or not?