Web 2.0 Magazine - Top 100 in Web 2.0

Following an extended New Year weekend – a very pleasant one at that - I thought a roundup of how far Web 2.0 has come would give the right kickoff to a January of highly anticipated surprises. Then I wondered, well, how best to do that? It turns out a brief outing – doing some searching on Technorati - led me to just the right place, which, in some ways, recaps Web 2.0’s history, which, if nothing else, speaks volumes to the pace at which the genre has gone from an abstract fragment of the Internet to a collection of sites that share hundreds of millions of users. Many are solo successes. Some have stayed small. But they’ve all played a part in helping us get organized, get better informed, and get more virtually social – and do many of those things in style.

The list I’ve linked to is equal parts informative, oddly attractive, and downright mess. I suppose Web 2.0 Magazine’s Top 100 Web 2.0 Sites list could be positioned as something of a collective preview of the next-gen Web’s best rather than an A-to-Z directory, but the way it’s been laid out makes me beg the question: Are we supposed to read it all?

You can read it all or you can take it piecemeal. But you’re bound to miss a few if haphazard scrolling is your way of conquering a blog post such as this. Looking past the lack of organization, however, the list is probably as bang-on as you’re going to get; in terms of the easy things like titles and descriptions, but also the diversity and the seemingly spontaneous placements of some of the items mentioned.

For example, Stumbleupon positioned directly below Wikipedia, followed by iNetWord? What’s iNetWord? (Apparently it’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get HTML editor.) Kayak, an engine for travel fans, has Gmail for a neighbor. And Meebo, the celebrated browser-based IM service that does it all, is just a couple of spaces from Magnolia and Musicovery to the north, with Podzinger several places below. The phrase “far and wide” comes to mind when going through the selection. As much as it is a challenge to digest it all, I think it’s fantastic that such a large collection could be made.

Why do I think so? The Top 100 Web 2.0 Sites list has “growth” written all over. In the last 12 months, Web 2.0 has picked up a great deal of speed, as well as followers, fans, and of course, its share of grinches too. It’s no longer a subset of the broader Net. It has effectively replaced what came before. And though it’s nice to recount history now and then, it should be foot-to-the-floor when it comes to progress and pushing Web 2.0 ideals on more eyes and ears and placing its powers into more hands is the best way to reframe the genre from it’s present status as an option and make it a standard.

Many years ago, a vast number of influential voices wrote the Internet off as a fad that had little potential other than to entertain geeks and circuit freaks. Then internet commerce surfaced. Then Amazon and eBay found their fans among the early adopters, and word of mouth allowed these burgeoning business to become some of the biggest economic forces in the world. What were then garage businesses are now conglomerates responsible for keeping the world’s markets steady. Some even go so far as alluding to the Nasdaq’s finest as the live preservers of a bullish 21st century. Today the most hyped software developer, having delivered nary a box of software to anyone, is biting at the heels of the largest boxed software manufacturer in the world. That’s gotta say something.

It’s all in good stead.

Web 2.0 has its faults, and not everyone’s star is going to shine brightly. Some die out, some get relegated to the bottom of the proverbial barrel. That’s just the way things swing in a [mostly] free market economy. Even hits like Myspace quickly get called out for their irrationally large userships, and I’m certainly in the camp that’s dubbed the US$1bn bids for relatively new startups nothing less than ridiculous. They may be popular, but when big corporations struggle to generate revenue exceeding one billion dollars per year, it’s hardly rational to offer a team of ten or so 20-somethings enough cash for several dozen yachts.

I won’t draft further on about this marvelous generation we have at hand and things yet to come. This would surely turn out a bore at page end if I were to carry on still. Perhaps you’ve already moved on. Okay, okay, I get it. It’s enough. Go ahead, read the list.