In this paper we examine some pragmatic concepts that we believe have a potential in relation to three core activities of the IS-field; 1) description and understanding, 2) evaluation, and 3) design. The concepts that we will examine are “social activity”, “communicative act”, “sequences of communicative acts” or “exchange types”, “communicative feedback” and “turn management”. We describe the concepts and then exemplify how they can be used to analyze web services by examining e-mail and Wikipedia as two activities currently on the web. Our analysis leads to a partly new description of both phenomena. It also leads to a number of open questions concerning the functionalities of both phenomena.