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as a boxy organizational chart but as a network with its many connections. In each, note where value is exchanged and captured (when you sell, you get revenue; when you talk with customers, you gain knowledge; when you meet counterparts, you make connections). Now examine how these networks can grow, how you can make more connections in each, how each connection can be more valuable for everyone. No longer see yourself as a box with one line up and a few lines down. Instead, put yourself in a cloud of connections that lights up each time a link is made, so the entire cloud keeps getting bigger, denser, and brighter—and more valuable. Then your world starts to look like Google’s.

Be a platform

Networks are built atop platforms. The internet is a platform, as is Google, as are services such as photo site Flickr, blogging service WordPress.com, payment service PayPal, self-publishing company Lulu.com, and business software company Salesforce.com. A platform enables. It helps others build value. Any company can be a platform. Home Depot is a platform for contractors and Continental Airlines is a platform for book tours. Platforms help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of their own. If it is open and collaborative, those users may in turn add value to the platforms—as IBM does when it shares the improvements it makes in the open-source Linux operating system.

Google has many platforms: Blogger for publishing content, Google Docs and Google Calendar for office collaboration, YouTube for videos, Picasa for photos, Google Analytics to track sites’ traffic, Google Groups for communities, AdSense for revenue. Google Maps is so good that Google could have put it on the web at maps.google.com and told us to come there to use it, and we would have. But Google also opened its maps so sites can embed them. A hotel can post a Google Map with directions. Suburbanites can embed maps on their blogs to point shoppers to garage sales. Google uses maps to enhance its own search and to serve relevant local ads; it is fast becoming the new Yellow Pages. Google Maps is so useful on my iPhone that I’d pay for it.

In the old architecture and language of centralized, controlling businesses, Google Maps would be a product that consumers may use, generating an audience that Google could sell to advertisers. That’s if Google wanted to stay in control. Instead, Google handed over control to anyone. It opened up maps so others could build atop them. This openness has spawned no end of new applications known as “mashups.” In its June 2007 issue, Wired magazine credited Paul Rademacher, a DreamWorks animation programmer, with inventing the map mashup. In 2004, while looking for an apartment in the San Francisco area, he carried piles of printouts of craigslist ads and maps and thought—rather like the guy who first smeared peanut butter on chocolate—that they should be combined. He discovered he could dig into Google’s code to put listings and maps together. After eight weeks, he had a demo that attracted thousands of users in a day. “I had no idea how big it would be. I just wanted to write something that was useful,” he said. “Microsoft and Yahoo followed suit,” Wired reported, “and before long the web was awash in map mashups.” Google didn’t sue Rademacher for messing with its product in an unauthorized manner. Google hired him.

Opening Google Maps as a platform spawned not just neat applications but entire businesses. Mobile phone companies are building Google Maps into their devices, which gets maps into the hands of new customers. Platial.com built an elegant user interface atop Google Maps that lets users place pins at any locations, showing the world anyone’s favorite restaurants or a family’s stops on vacation. Neighbors can collaborate and create a map pinpointing all the potholes in town. That map could, in turn, be embedded on a blog or a newspaper page. News sites have used maps to have readers pinpoint their photos during big stories, such as floods in the U.K.

Adrian Holovaty, a journalist/technologist