Webware 100 Winners - Who won, and what’s new.


Web Apps.  Can we live without them anymore? What did we ever do without them? Webware put out it’s top 100 and we’re going to go through them and see what was good, what was bad, and what was… well, you know..

Webware is a site dedicated to watching what is popping up out on the internet. Any application that a web developer puts out will be checked out and reported on by this organization. It’s a good thing, too. There are so many out there, it’s tough to keep up.

On April 21st, Webware put out the list of the top 100 apps. There were ten categories, each with ten winners. There were 5000 nominees, and 300 apps were chosen as finalists. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to dwindle this list down to 100.

According to Webware, most of the winners were also winners last year. There were a couple apps that pushed their way onto the list. This might not be as easy next year as Web Apps are expected to be more widely used within 2008.

So here are the top picks:

In the Audio category, we saw popular names like iTunes, Zune, eMusic and AmazonMP3. It was great to see sites like Lastfm, live365 and blogtalk radio on the list.

The Browsing category had Firefox, Google and Google Reader, Internet Explorer and Opera. iPhone was the newcomer and not a surprise to the list. Maxthon Browser is a lesser known app that is great to see win in this category.

Commerce and events saw Amazon, ebay, Google adwords, Paypall and Yahoo on the list. It was great to see Craigslist - it’s such a popular site and not graphically driven. Kayak was the name I wasn’t familiar with. It is a Travel aggregation website - which means it will find the best rates from the other sites, then redirect you there.

In Communication we saw Gmail, Skype, Yahoo mail and AIM. Meebo is a multinetwork IM platform that lets you chat between AIM, Yahoo, google and msn. Pidgen also is a multi IM site. and OoVoo is a chat and Video chat site. Too bad Twitter or Friendfeed didn’t make it.

Productivity showed us Google Docs, Microsoft Office Workspace and Yahoo Calendar. Some other lesser known sites could be Basecamp, Mint, Remember the Milk and Zoho. It keeps reminding me I have work to do…

Publishing and Photography contained sites like Blogger, Drupal, Flickr, WordPress and Twitter. Good to see an old site friend in Worth 1000 - a Photoshopping contest site - added to the winners.

The Search and Answers section had a host of old favorites. From Ask, Google, Wikipedia and Yahoo. A new entrant is Hakia. It’s a new site that searches on common words.

The Social winners were MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google LiveJournal. Friendster had some tough times and almost were bought out by Google. However they prevailed and joined the list of the top 10 in this category. I may never go to “Stardoll”, but for anyone that wants to “Dress up dolls”, this may be the Social site for them.

Utility and security showed sites like Amazon, Bittorrent, Yahoo, Yousendit and OpenID. It’s also good to see OpenDNS in the list. It’s a great way to thwart online rogues in getting your information.

Last, but not least, the Video category had a lot of new names in it. YouTube, Netflix and Amazon were the three mainstays. Ustream and Joost were ones I knew about. Fixmymovie helps clear up pixilated video. A pretty good service - I may need it for my videos…

The list is pretty impressive. Like I said earlier, it’s too bad Friendfeed wasn’t on the list. Pownce is another site I can think of. But there is always next year.  And it will be a competition to look forward to.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 and is filed under 5 minute podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Comcast is Watching You. Good or Bad?

Comcast is Watching You. Good or Bad?

The New York Times reports of a Blogger who gets an email after complaining about a service that is not there. Other people have complained about their bills and Comcast comes back with a “Can I Help”? Even others find themselves with internet connection issues for trying to use the service. This begs the question: are we seeing a new trend and is this a good or bad thing?

First of all, most likely they are not looking at your blog or twitter directly. They are most likely running searches from Google, Summize (remember - Twitter bought that company) and a bunch of other engines. They look at keywords that - in turn - give them information to turn around and say “What can we do?”

Last year while working at a job, we decided to implement a helpdesk system. I looked over a few systems, gave a recommendation and we implemented. The one I’m going to talk about wasn’t the one we went with simply because there were good features they lacked, but this is one feature that really made me think about the way we can see customers.

The service let you put a piece of code on each users’ desktop. When they logged into the network, that code would send a log to the helpdesk software. If any keywords showed up, the software would alert the helpdesk so action could be taken before the customer could call in.

Think about it: Google a specific topic. Let’s take Comcast for example. Go to Google, then “Advanced Search”. Type in “Comcast”, and filter to the last 24 hours. Not only will you get blogs, but you will also get twitters, plurks and a host of other items.

Now  if you organize that with specific keywords like “Comcast” and maybe a hot word like “sucks”, you can see all the blogs and posts that follow. If someone wrote an API that could constantly search for these words, then they can report on a system and get back to the author.

Of course, if you are on Comcast’s’ network and sending plain text (like most blogs are), then it’s ten times easier for Comcast to filter and respond. If it was encrypted, that would be a different story. However it’s only plain old text passing through the internet for all to read - including Comcast.

What is the good? Well, you may not want them to watch what you are sending, but if you put it out on Twitter or in a blog, you want people to see it anyway. So why not Comcast? Why not AT&T? Why not Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs? I suppose if Ballmer or Jobs were to call you tomorrow over a blog or Twitter, you might see that as an honor that they are noticing your posts.

It can also alert people of any questionable activity. In this post 9-11 era, concern over communication is a hot issue. With so many ways to communicate over the internet, it might be nice to stop another epic event before it takes place.

What is the Bad? Well, it’s just another form of Big brother watching. One more step closer for RIAAs and MPAAs to surface. It is wrong to duplicate and distribute copyrighted material, but for those who don’t do that it’s not fair if we are being watched.

Dave Winer reported that right before an Obama speech, he was disconnected from Comcast for “Security” issues. Dave instantly closed his Comcast account. If I was in the same position, I think I would have either done the same thing or strongly worded the incident and made sure enough people heard it. I would most likely do the latter if I didn’t have another avenue of connection.

Is there a “Happy Medium”? Not really. That is why history is riddled with events like witch hunts and the Spanish Inquisition (Yeah, I know. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition). But with pressure to have a safe lifestyle, you have to have someone watching over it, right?

Well, someone or something might be watching you now. Whether it’s the ISP seeing what you are posting on your Blog or twitter, a security camera watching your actions in and out of a retail store, an ATM watching you take your money or one person just peering out the window to see what you’re up to. It’s all the same, right?

Some may call this move by Comcast as creepy. Others may call it brilliant because they are preventing issues. Even others may call it questionable practice because they are watching you. But the old saying “Danged if you do, danged if you don’t” can come into play here. We want to be safe but we don’t want to be watched or held accountable. What goes on behind closed doors….


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