Sweden is a nation determined to be an international competitor in the IT arena. IT budgets in the private and public sector add up to 5% of Sweden's total National Growth Product; IT and entrepreneurship are a huge part of the cultural agenda; and Swedish success stories like Skype and The Pirate Bay get a lot of attention in international media and on blogs. Despite all of this, there are relatively few Swedish Web 2.0 apps that stand out from the crowd.

A point of interest for all of non-swedes is that Swedish web apps generally use two domain extensions. The .se extension is the most common and used by serious enterprises. The .nu means “now” in Swedish and is used in various concept sites and hip companies. The extension was purchased from the small island kingdom of Nieu in the Pacific ocean.

Digga.se is a dig clone with less features. Users submit links and they are graded by other users. The posts can be graded (“diggade”) by users and tagged, which generates top lists and a very Web 2.0 cloud (“Taggmoln” in swedish).

Bubblare.se is a YouTube clone, but with many fewer features. The amount of copyrighted material is about the same. The video clips are played in bubblare's own flash player - and like You tube, movie clips are supplied with an HTML string that lets any viewer paste the clip onto their own webpage.

Lunarstorm.se is the largest community for teens in Sweden. It has been active since 1999 and is still the most popular place to hang out for youths between 13 and 18. An account offers about the same number of features as MySpace. A cool feature is the page header banner with a live stream of messages. The messages are text messages, submitted from users' mobile phones. Users also get points for writing in each others guestbooks, or sending internal email - which encourages use of the service. The points are worth nothing but online status.

Podradio.nu is a community for people who listen to podcasts. The various podcasts are tagged and graded by the users and are presented in lists by tag, popularity and date. The users are also encouraged to create their own podcasts and are free to upload these to their podradio account.

kloudberry.se is a site that lets users create invitations for parties and events. The service includes graphical invitation cards and a discussion forum for the invited to chat before the event.

Hitta.se is a search service that lets users find phone numbers, addresses and other public information about Swedish citizens. It is complete with an Ajax generated map service which shows the address you searched for. The really cool, but also a little creepy, feature is that they can display a photo of almost any front door on every building in Sweden!

Knuff.se is one of Sweden's most popular blog farms. Blog authors ping the site nyligen.se and are added to the Knuff register. The manager of Knuff also manages other popular blog services like bloggkartan.se, intressant.se and bloggtips.se.

buzz.bazooka.se is not a new service, but qualifies for this post under the “user-created content” category. Buzz is a moderated news and link aggregator. Users submit links to the site. Selected links are posted on the front page, where they are graded by users. Due to the small amount of links that are posted on the frontpage, users are keen on submitting quality links and compete for the attention. A link posted on Buzz can get around 5000 page views the day it is posted.

googlecloud.com is not a stand alone web app, but a mashup between a new service and google. It contains a search field that uses google search, but the search also includes googlecloud statistics. The service displays the most common searches in a nice cloud.

Biblioteket.se is a national project to connect government libraries in Sweden (first Stockholm) and open an online service that let users browse library archives, download books, and leave user reviews on books and papers. The site is not yet operational but there is a clickable version at bibliotek.se.

Susning.nu is a wikipedia clone and quite successful. The wiki was temporary closed for editing in 2004, due to spam, but is now open to selected users.

Summary

Thank you Bjorn Fant for writing this post! If you are from Sweden or are familiar with the market, please add any other Swedish web apps or information to the comments.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India and Austria.