Dot com start ups (minus the dot com); or, what media companies no longer do

Is it a big deal that Fred Wilson tells us Union Square has just made its first investment in a company that doesn't have a website? Probably.

Of course there are companies in the world that don't have websites (presumably - I don't know how on earth I'd find an example) but Zynga has the more remarkable distinction of being a dot com without the dot com, a games developer that designs Facebook (etc) apps and doesn't have its own website.

Last year I wrote a post about what newspapers no longer (necessarily) do - including print their own paper or write their own words - and concluded that if you can call yourself a newspaper without a printing plant or journalists then the core value-add of a newspaper is the validation, the decision as to what is true and therefore qualifies as fit to "print". (Steve Yelvington goes some way to confirming this interpretation today when he writes that the Miami Herald has given up outsourcing its editorial process.)

Now I can add to that something that web companies no longer (necessarily) do - have their own website. It's passe to point out that they don't need their own servers or databases any more and can just outsource them to Amazon; passe to claim that we may be stumbling ever-closer to Thomas J Watson's vision of a world market for just five computers. But a dot com that doesn't even need a website?  That looks like a big deal, something fundamental shifting again in what it means to be a media company in the digital age. But before we run away with the idea that the future will be made of websiteless dot coms that just piggyback the existing social networking infrastructure, I give you the ever-excellent Mr Stephen Fry:

"For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern."

Of course, we know that open beats closed (though there is, as my dear friend Alexandra would say, a difference between open and gaping). Which is why the "(etc)" after "Facebook" in the second paragraph is so important. Zynga develops games for Facebook and Bebo and "several others". Looks like the value here really isn't with the social networks. Media companies don't even need a website any more.