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

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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 21^st, 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.