| Looking back over 2006 it's clear that
we've experienced one of the most remarkable growth surges in Web application history.
Literally hundreds of Web sites and applications were launched this year and brought to
our attention via the popular review sites like Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, Pete
Cashmore's Mashable , and Emily Chang's eHub. And our very popular list of last year's
Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 was ultimately read by hundreds of thousands of readers in
over a dozen languages. This makes it clear that not only is the ongoing supply of
capable, online software flowing freely but that there is high-demand from the general Web
populace as well.
The overall trend:
We have begun moving all our software, data, and even our
social activities onto the Web en masse and the demand for high-quality online sites and
applications that support this shift in primary focus from the PC to the Internet is there
in vast numbers (there are now 1 billion users on the Web today). The net result is that
2006 brought us some of the best online applications ever created and you can see the
results for yourself below.
Last year's Web 2.0 software list we had a variety of
categories ranging from Image Storing and Sharing to Web-Based Word Processing. Since
then, the scope of Web applications has broadened considerably as has the definition of
Web 2.0 itself, which has formalized and settled a bit as well. This reflects the real
diversity in online applications from every kind of social media site to online
productivity apps.
Thus this year's categories have been consolidated and new
categories added. Most notably I've added a Office 2.0 Suite category to cover the growing
lists of ensemble software sites such as Zoho's Office Suite that are increasingly
treading squarely on the integrated feature set that traditional productivity suites like
Microsoft Office and Open Office.
Note: The site did not have to launch in 2006 to make this
list, it just had to provide the best offering in a given category during the calendar
year.
The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006
Category: Social Network
Best Offering: MySpace
Description: The pre-eminent granddaddy of all social
networking sites, MySpace needs no introduction. And while it's taken hit in numerous
quarters for the quality of its users and content, for its lack of attractiveness, and
even garnered a reputation for being a somewhat unsafe place to socialize online, it's
still far and away the leader in terms of users. Easy to use and very customizable,
MySpace offers some of the best user experience as well. And users apparently agree. If
you take a look at the (unscientific and off-the-cuff) Alexa traffic chart of the other
top social networking sites, you'll see that MySpace remains an absolute juggernaut. And
it's because of this very fact MySpace remains the place where the most users are and
there are now those fully taking advantage of that fact. A key trend: Businesses are
increasingly opening up storefronts on MySpace. Why? It's easy to do and a great draw for
customers in a younger demographic. Hollywood has taken to promoting its films with
MySpace profiles and countless companies are using it has a marketing and advertising
platform such as HBO with their Entourage car giveaway earlier this year. And while
commercialism of just about any new media is inevitable, it reaffirms that MySpace remains
the king. That's not to say that plenty of other good social networking sites don't exist.
But they simply can't come close to matching in terms of scale, which means MySpace
remains the most significant online community today.
Category: Start Pages
Best Offering: Netvibes
Description: Netvibes won this category in last year's list
and also gets the #1 spot this year. The start page pheneomenon has been an interesting
online Web app trend that got underway in 2005 with the release of numerous different
products in this space. In short, start pages provide a roaming desktop that can host all
of a user's most common Web information such as news, weather, e-mail, RSS feeds, and
more, all in a single user-controlled Web page. My overview of these earlier this year on
ZDNet was Slashdotted, just another indicator of the apparent popularity of these
personalized Web desktops, usually powered by Ajax but often by Flash as well. During 2006
however, not many of these products saw serious growth and their visitor traffic growth
has been slow. Except for Netvibes that is, which has been growing month by month by
offering things like an extremely polished look and feel, localization in many different
languages, and open API. The last piece is critical for allowing others to add to and
build upon the Netvibes platform (turning applications into platforms being a key Web 2.0
technique) and result of this shows clearly in the Netvibes product. The Netvibes
developer ecosystem is vibrant and growing with over 500 different add-on modules from
Comic of the Day to a module that will quickly turn any document into a PDF file. While
Live.com has much more overall traffic than Netvibes, it's likely due to Microsoft's own
mega-ecosystem since personalization has moved to the back burner of the front page of
Live.com and has been upstaged by Microsoft's search engine. Click here for a more
complete list of existing start pages.
Category: Social Bookmarking
Best Offering: StumbleUpon
Description: StumbleUpon has unseated last year's winner,
del.icio.us. Search engines like Google can help you find the material you're looking for
using keywords, but social bookmarking sites can let you directly harness the collective
intelligence of other users on the Web the directly share personal interests with you.
Theoretically, this can help you find what you're looking for better, but what it really
ends up doing is helping you find things that you never knew existing, but wished you did.
StumbeUpon installs a toolbar in your browser and lets you collaborative rate content.
This improves the recommendations for other users and behavior matching is used to find
users like you and pages that you haven't seen before, on-demand. One indicator I use for
the popularity of a social bookmarking site is how much inbound traffic I get from it, and
I've seen a clear switch during the year from del.icio.us bookmarks to StumbleUpon
referrers. StumbleUpon reports that it has over 1.7 million registered users and growing.
Bottom Line: Del.icio.us is still my favorite bookmarking service, but for true content
discovery, StumbleUpon now makes it much easier to find new content than del.icio.us does.
StumbleUpon is a winner by a nose for taking content discovery to the next step.
Category: Peer Production News
Best Offering: Netscape.com
Description: In a decision that likely won't be agreed with
by the users of last year's winner in this category, Netscape has been selected as the
best all around peer production news site. Though Digg is more popular in terms of traffic
than the next three most popular peer production news sites in this category combined
(though only barely), Digg remains primarily a technology news site, with actual general
purpose news seeping in occasionally around the edges. In contrast, Netscape consistently
delivers news on its front page that is genuinely newsworthy and geared towards a broad
audience, combined with a mature community that frequently engages in genuine civil
discourse in the comments. This highlights the demographics of the site of course since
peer production sites have the news stories delivered by their users and the top stories
selected by other users. Thus Netscape currently provides the best overall mix of news
content and community and wins this year's peer production news category.
Category: Social Media Sharing
Best Offering: YouTube
Description: The rise of YouTube this year has been one of
the most phenomenal rises of an online property in Internet history. With up to 100
million viewers in a given day and averaging 65,000 videos uploaded per day, YouTube has
successfully leveraged network effects for growth and viral adoption with a success that
few have ever equaled. Last year image sharing was the hot social media sharing play, but
2006 is clearly the year of video. You can find a video on just about anything you can
think of on YouTube and its radical ease of use, innovative tagging infrastrcture, and
drop-dead easy to host YouTube badge (with the Javascript snippet it for it right next to
each and every video) sets the standard for the rest of the industry. The selection for
this category was easy and YouTube was the clear choice.
Category: Online Storage
Best Offering: Amazon's S3 with JungleDisk
Description: I did a round-up earlier this year of most of
the leading online storage products (and there are many), but the one that I have ended up
using the most by far and ultimately selecting as my permanent online storage solution is
Amazon's terrific S3 storage Web services API combined with Jungle Disk for Windows
Explorer integration. S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and that's exactly what it is.
There's no limit to how much data you can store with S3, how much data you can transfer to
and from your home or work PC from S3, and S3 is very fast, reliable, secure, and cheap. I
now host hundreds of gigabytes of data in my S3 account for a few dollars a month and I
can access it from anywhere I travel without having to worry about backups or otherwise
maintaining my data to make sure it's not lost (Amazon does it all for you). While there
are other good online storage solutions, nothing comes close to the freedom and security
of using S3 since Amazon is one of the leading Internet companies and will likely be
around for a long time.
Category: Office 2.0 Suite
Best Offering: Zoho Office Suite
Description: The Office 2.0 phenomenon become a true
reality this year as just about any kind of business application could be found in a
purely browser version. Zoho has been diligently releasing product and product this year
and now has entire online productivity suite that has a word processor, spreadsheet, wiki,
project management, presentation, contact management, and much more. While you can find
the individual pieces from various other Web apps, Zoho provides a nice integrated,
one-stop package that is very reminiscent of Microsoft Office. Microsoft and Google have
been slow to get fully into this space and it may very well end up that smaller players
establish dominance in an area that most expected the Big Two would dominate in this
space. And an important space it is too: Online apps ultimately will be where our software
and data is for most users, and establishing leadership in this product space with the Web
as the only major new software paltform on the horizon is a major open opportunity.
Note: Last year I broke the individual categories of Office
2.0 out, and with the overall quality of such tools now being fairly consistent, I'm now
highlighting the suite aspect as an important trend trend in 2006.
Blog Filters:
Like last year, Gabe Rivera's brilliant meme engine for the
blogosphere still reigns supreme as far as taking the pulse of the conversation on the Web
right now. And its permalinking structure with history support is just about the best
example of Web design and content addressibility that I've seen. If you aren't using
TechMeme daily to see what's going on, you don't know what you're missing.
Social Music:
Online music doesn't get easier than Pandora, which has now
become my favorite way to discover new music. Just a single Web page written in OpenLaszo,
Pandora creates a custom radio station for every visitor in seconds based on the names of
artists or songs you know, and then continously plays new music related to what you
suggested. Now with social features, Pandora serves The Long Tail of music demand very
nicely and is very easy to use and it shows: Pandora reportedly has over 2 million users.
Professional Social Network:
2006 was the year that having a LinkedIn profile was almost
mandatory if you were in business, particularly now that all profiles have a URL. Almost
everyone has received a LinkedIn invitation at some time or other, and LinkedIn really
made it on the radar this year. While lacking robust social networking features such as
blogging, LinkedIn's core functionality of maintaining a network of contacts that is
automatically updated as people move around from job to job is just about the best out
there.
Consumer Generated Advertising:
The Chevy Apprentice campaign was just about the best
example of a true Web 2.0 phenomenon as GM opened up the doors in early 2006 of a
competition for anyone to create online videos about the Chevy Tahoe SUV, tends of
thousands which were ultimately created and submitted. GM even left the negative ads up
and sparked a real conversation about how much control of their marketing message should
companies hand over to their customers. Since the original competition site is no longer
online, click on the picture above or here to see the YouTube hosted copies of the ads
that were created, some of which are very creative and are just as often negative as they
are positive.
Web Application Stack:
Ruby on Rails took a front seat this year as it become one
of the most popular new ways to develop online database-driven software, Web 2.0-style
(collective intelligence apps) or otherwise. I wrote up a more detailed story about Ruby
on Rails for ZDNet that's worth reading if you want more details but the big take away is
that Ruby on Rails is optimized for ease-of-development, extremely rapid results with
little effort (10-20 times more productive that previous platforms like J2EE and .NET). I
suspect that in 2007 the majority of new Web apps will be developed in Rails or PHP,
they're just that much better.
Mashup Tool:
While next year will see the release of a flood of end-user
mashup tools, a few good ones hit this year, but DataMashups.com gets the credit for
getting there first and with a surprisingly robust product. I recently wrote up the state
of mashups for 2006 as well as a round-up of mashup tools , and while it's still an
product space that is in its very early stages, the promise is impressive for users to
soon be able to assemble the software solutions they need onthe fly. Expect the mashup
tool market to start growing rapidly in 2007.
And that's it for now. And since this is a Web 2.0 blog,
please do contribute your own mentions and nominations below and I'll do an update a few
times with some of the best suggestions so we can make this the best Web software list of
2006. |
