The results are in!

I don’t know if any of you have been paying this any attention, but the results are in from the WebWare best Web 2.0 applications on the internet awards. This is a list of 100 applications (both popular and not-so popular) that can be either web based or computer based, and which were selected from a list of over 5000 nominations. I have been awaiting the results keenly and have even voted in the survey myself, and apparently so did half a million other people during a 20 day period. So with this large number of people voting are the results worth looking at? I think they are. Although some of them are not strictly Web 2.0, this is an influential list and will surely drive much traffic and respect to the applications that won. I am going to take a look at the top 10 most voted for applications in alphabetical order and see if they should be there. This top 10 actually received around 45% of the total votes so they are definitely influential applications.

Bebo – A social networking site much like MySpace and Facebook and was apparently the most searched for term on the Internet in 2006 (according to Google zeitgeist). I don’t go on social networking sites for the simple reason that I just don’t have the time so my knowledge of Bebo stops right here.

Firefox – Ah, Firefox. How much do I love thee? Let me count the ways! But seriously, this is the only web browser that got into the top 10 so this is a major achievement. I do think that the "geek factor" is at play here. What I mean by that is that even if other applications are within the same category many users will simply vote for Firefox for the simple reason that it is Firefox. If you haven’t replaced Internet Explorer with this wonderful, secure, customisable, extensible application then you should at least give it a go. I only ever use IE to make sure that sites work in that browser and to use Windows update.

Gaia Online – Egads! Another social networking site! Well mostly. This site is apparently a mixture of social networking and massively multiplayer online games so I can only presume that it is like a web based SecondLife.

Gmail – As soon as I started using Gmail I simply stopped using any other email application whether they were web based or not. There are no other email services out there that give you 2 gigabytes of storage, free POP3 integration and with a second-to-none application interface. It also seamlessly integrates a chat application (Google Talk) into the same page so you can check your email and chat with friends at the same time. There are also a couple of applications that allow you to use Google Mail much like another hard disk on your computer. Before this came out I was using Hotmail, and getting massively fed up with it, I have never looked back.

Google – The best search engine in the world, and now it’s official! Nothing wrong with this result.

MySpace – I’m not surprised that this website is in there somewhere, it had to be really. With a monthly search volume of 843,590 in the UK, 25 million in the USA, 190 million search results in Google and an Alexa rank of 6 it is one of the largest and most popular sites on the internet, after the major search engines. It is one of the most recognised social networking tools in the world with a massive user base so I can immediately see why it got so many results. It gets enough free advertising from BBC Radio One DJ’s! The fact that there are three different social networking sites in the top 10 suggests to me that they are very popular.

Stardoll – I thought when I saw this that there must be some mistake. The premise is that you create your own doll using the sites flash interface and dress it however you want to. You can also use a set of stock celebrity dolls that you can dress up. What use is it? It has 8 million members and I can’t even figure out why you would want to use this. Very disturbing…

Wikipedia – This is seen as a good and bad thing. The idea behind the initial set up was simple. Set up a web based application that users could edit and try to put together a definitive encyclopaedia of everything. The reality wasn’t like that and they have had to put in place many different mechanisms to stop it being abused. In saying that it is a powerful site and I see it every day when doing analysis of keywords, it seems to be in the top 10 for just about everything.

WordPress – This is a brilliant blog application and the fact that this is the only blog within the top 10 just goes to show how good the application is. There is no coincidence that we use WordPress on our own blog and that it is the first choice when setting up blogs for our customers. In search engine optimisation terms it is second to none.

YouTube – A very popular video sharing site, bought by Google a couple of years ago for untold millions of pounds. In my opinion Google Video is much better, has longer videos and isn’t full of porn, but it wasn’t even in the running. Maybe WebWare thought that there were already too many Google applications in the finalists?

One surpise result was the fact that StumbeUpon only received 784 votes. However, I think that this might be an artificially low result as it was placed in the same category as Firefox, which would have got more votes. Had StumbleUpon been in a different category I’m sure it would have got a lot more votes. Another site that received a suprisingly low amount of votes was Feedburner, but I think this was due to it being in the same category as WordPress, which is a very strong application with a massive fan base. Feedburner, although useful, is quite a specialised application.

Overall a very interesting competition. I am already wondering what will happen next year! However, I would suggest to WebWare that they either drop the categories or allow people to vote more than once in each category.

Phil
Programmer, Research and Development