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My friend Allan, sent me an email a few days ago sharing with me a cool map called the Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map. It isn’t new (launched in August) but I found it very cool and interesting that I decided to share it with you guys. This map was created by the folks from Web 2.0 Summit – an annual event, held in San Francisco, California, featuring discussions about the World Wide Web.

The map’s theme was taken from this year’s Web 2.0 Summit theme which is Points of Control. The Web 2.0 Summit team decided to create a map visualizing the points of control on the web. Below is an excerpt from the blog post announcing the release of the Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map:

As themes for conferences go, Points of Control is one of our favorites. Our industry over the past year has been driven by increasingly direct conflicts between its major players: Apple has emerged as a major force in mobile and advertising platforms; Google is fighting off Microsoft in search, Apple in mobile and Facebook in social; and Facebook itself finds itself on the defensive against Twitter and scores of location startups like Foursquare.

Nor are the Internet’s biggest players the only ones in the game – the rise of tablet computing has revived nearly every major hardware and handset manufacturer, and the inevitable march of online payment and commerce has roused the financial services giants as well. You know we’re in interesting times when American Express is considered an insurgent in its own industry.

The narrative is so rich, it struck us that it lends itself to a visualization – a map outlining these points of control, replete with incumbents and insurgents – those companies who hold great swaths of strategic territory, and those who are attempting to gain ground, whether they be startups or large companies moving into new ground. Inspired in part by board games like Risk or Stratego, and in part by the fantastic and fictional lands of authors like Tolkien and Swift, we set out to create at least an approximation of our industry’s vibrant economy.

To learn more about the Points of Control Map and read the detailed explanation, check out this blog post on the Web 2.0 Summit Blog.

Screenshots:
Territory Mode

Acquisition Mode

Movements

Comments

The Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map, created in cooperation with Blend Interactive is built on top of Google’s map API and contains two layers of detail – Territory Mode & Acquisition Mode. The map is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that users/people are encouraged to use the idea, contribute to it and make it better. To read or add your own comments, just click on comments, choose a specific area/region and then click on the comment bubbles. Users can login via their Twitter or Facebook accounts.

The map may be boring for some but if you’re interested with the current web trends, this is something you’d be interested in. If you liked this map, you might also be interested in a similar map that focuses on Social Networks.

What do you think of the Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map? What other features or options you think should be added to it? What other ways can a map like this be used for? Please share your thoughts.