It really depends on your definition of "list." I would actually argue that the entire Internet is made up of lists, but there are a few things that change the way we see them:
* Cadence (how often the lists changes)
* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)
* Sort (how the content is sorted)
If we wander back into the earlier Internet, Yahoo was arguably the dominant player. And what was Yahoo? A list of links divided up by category.
Google came along and won the game because it's better in the world than anyone else at sorting lists of webpages. It's so good that it can actually sort them without having anyone ever see them or read them, and that allows them to scale to a level Yahoo couldn't even dream of, with better results all the while. Google is the best, technology-enabled list-making service in the world.
Now the way most people use Facebook is to see a list of all the stuff their friends have posted about. Originally it was ordered solely by time, but now they have a little more data about what you like to click on and what/who you're interested in, and help you out a bit.
Twitter is a list of what certain people and organizations you follow are publishing right now.
HackerNews and Reddit and ProductHunt are lists of the best X as decided by the community, with a gravity (or 24-hour session) added so the older stuff falls down over time, keeping them fresh.
Pinterest, although not a list in the sense that it's a vertical ascending/descending list (unless you're on a mobile device), is in actuality a list of all the products and photos your friends are gathering into their various collections.
The purpose of Yelp and Foursquare is largely to give me a list of places I should go to based on the information provided by my friends or the crowd.
In other words, the reason you're not seeing lists is because you're thinking of "lists" as a two-dimensional object; something in which someone comes in and compiles a list of X and others consume it. In reality this is happening in several ways, there's just often a lot more nuance and color than someone coming through to create their own collection.
At the end of the day, a list is just a data sort. The Internet is made of lists. The interesting thing, at least in my opinion, is how you accumulate that data and how you sort it. If you define "list-making" as the accumulation and sorting of data, almost every big tech company I can think of is in the list-making business.
* Cadence (how often the lists changes)
* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)
* Sort (how the content is sorted)
If we wander back into the earlier Internet, Yahoo was arguably the dominant player. And what was Yahoo? A list of links divided up by category.
Google came along and won the game because it's better in the world than anyone else at sorting lists of webpages. It's so good that it can actually sort them without having anyone ever see them or read them, and that allows them to scale to a level Yahoo couldn't even dream of, with better results all the while. Google is the best, technology-enabled list-making service in the world.
Now the way most people use Facebook is to see a list of all the stuff their friends have posted about. Originally it was ordered solely by time, but now they have a little more data about what you like to click on and what/who you're interested in, and help you out a bit.
Twitter is a list of what certain people and organizations you follow are publishing right now.
HackerNews and Reddit and ProductHunt are lists of the best X as decided by the community, with a gravity (or 24-hour session) added so the older stuff falls down over time, keeping them fresh.
Pinterest, although not a list in the sense that it's a vertical ascending/descending list (unless you're on a mobile device), is in actuality a list of all the products and photos your friends are gathering into their various collections.
The purpose of Yelp and Foursquare is largely to give me a list of places I should go to based on the information provided by my friends or the crowd.
In other words, the reason you're not seeing lists is because you're thinking of "lists" as a two-dimensional object; something in which someone comes in and compiles a list of X and others consume it. In reality this is happening in several ways, there's just often a lot more nuance and color than someone coming through to create their own collection.
At the end of the day, a list is just a data sort. The Internet is made of lists. The interesting thing, at least in my opinion, is how you accumulate that data and how you sort it. If you define "list-making" as the accumulation and sorting of data, almost every big tech company I can think of is in the list-making business.