Earlier this week we announced our Best BigCo of 2007, Facebook. In this post we're announcing our pick for Best LittleCo. We're also asking for your nominations for Most Promising Web Company for 2008.
These picks are something we do every year, this being the 4th year. Last year's Best LittleCo was YouTube, with Sharpcast selected as Most Promising. In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising. In 2004 Ludicorp, creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner was named Most Promising.
As you can see, most of our picks have gone on to enjoy more widespread success - YouTube, Ludicorp, Feedburner have all been acquired; while 37Signals, Techmeme, Digg and Sharpcast have all ramped up and enjoyed success. So to 2007, a year in which trends such as Mobile Web, social networking and micro-blogging have increased in popularity. It's been another bumper year of startup activity, so which among the hundreds of startups has impressed the most in 2007?
As with the BigCo selection, the Read/WriteWeb authors were unanimous in our decision. The Best LittleCo of 2007 is Twitter, Inc. Already this week there has been a lot of analysis about Twitter, with some people embracing it and others critical. Our own Alex Iskold summed it up well in his post entitled The Evolution of Personal Publishing, when he described Twitter as a kind of mix between social networks and chat. The term for this has come to be know as microblogging. Here is how Alex described it:
"Social network publishing is very terse, blog publishing is verbose. Is there a form of publishing which is on one hand as easy as social networking, but as sequential as regular blogs? Twitter and Tumblr have recently emerged to define this new category of microblogging."
The simple idea of Twitter is to express what you are doing right now, in 140 characters or less. Admittedly Twitter is still very much a niche, geek activity. Earlier this year I witnessed a fellow Web 2.0 Expo attendee twittering on a mobile phone while walking down a busy San Francisco road with a group of us - and she tripped up and fell. Which kind of sums up Twitter for the early adopter, geek crowd: it is addictive, distracting, and not really necessary.
However RWW did highlight some real-world uses this year - e.g. Amazon uses it to promote its products; and Burmese bloggers used a similar product to Twitter, a lightweight messaging service called CBox, to post very short updates from inside the country.
Twitter is undoubtedly new and disruptive. In a year in which you can count on one hand the number of disruptive Web products (iPhone would be another), Twitter stands out as being something that has captured the imagination and become a new hybrid of chat, social networking and blogging.
One of the most important things Twitter has done is open up an API to outside developers (this is an argument that co-founder Biz Stone made to us in September). According to Twitter, the API has seen such incredible growth, that just months after it was released it is already getting 10 times the traffic of the Twitter web site. For examples, check out our Top 10 Twitter Apps from July; and Marshall Kirkpatrick's comprehensive RWW Guide to the World's Most Popular Twitter Clients.
One of Twitter's cheif rivals, Jaiku, was acquired by Google in October. Other similar products that impressed us this year included (but not limited to): Tumblr, Kyte (a video twitter), Soup, Pownce, and the 10 microblogging tools we reviewed in September.
See Also: Evolution of Communication: From Email to Twitter and Beyond
So there you have it, Twitter is our Best LittleCo this year. Now we turn our attention to what is the most promising Web product or company for 2008 - and we need your help! Let us know in the comments what is most promising for you, and why. We'll announce this very soon!
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Hooray for Twitter! I am the 13,621st person to signup. What number are you? ( Hint: its in your Twitter RSS feed )
Posted by: Todd | December 13, 2007 1:39 PMBricaBox.com
(No shame in nominating yourself!)
Posted by: Nate Westheimer | December 13, 2007 1:41 PMThere's a lot of talk about Twitter "public API apps", but surprisingly little about integrating it into "private apps."
It's a key part of our MIS now - at 3pm every afternoon, our server makes a Twitter API call, and the management team get the "headline performance figures" for the day.
It was an utter breeze to program - we had the key figures in the MIS anyway, and "text-message-enabling" them took about 2 lines of code and zero call cost, because we did it through Twitter.
Costing out a bespoke SMS solution came to much higher numbers.
Performance is typically sub 10 seconds from the event triggering on the server to ringing the "new message received" note on the mobile.
Currently the debate is whether the team want a second call at 6pm :-) The debate has moved to EVERYTHING about information requirements, and NOTHING about IT systems requirements.
Twitter does the heavy lifting!
Mark
Posted by: Mark Harrison | December 13, 2007 1:45 PMInteresting.
Posted by: Vyrotek | December 13, 2007 1:46 PMAm I the only one that doesnt see a point to using Twitter?
http://www.beYOU.tv Log on. Workout!
Posted by: Greg Schnese | December 13, 2007 2:37 PMhttp://www.zlio.com
I would nominate Zlio (that you featured already on RWW), since this company is bringing a loooot of innovation to the E-Commerce Space (watch out for the new version launching soon). Indeed, this service turns anyone into a virtual salespeople, that can monetize his time spent daily on the web.
Posted by: iLan | December 13, 2007 2:53 PMEveryone is an expert on something, and thanks to the "web 2.0", we all have our own distribution channel : blog, social networks, IM, twitter, ... As far as I am concerned, I believe that Zlio has found the best way to help anyone monetize its own audience, by combining the latest web trends!
A potential unknown - I would nominate www.RealSelf.com - it's an incredible niche community that is changing their particular industry. Look at the depth/passion people are communicating in those threads - before making life altering decisions. Rising star in 2008.
Thanks for asking!
Posted by: gbear | December 13, 2007 5:58 PMTwitter sounds like a public SMS. So what is new?
Posted by: Joseph Pally | December 13, 2007 10:47 PMI wonder if RWW should put up a link for printing posts... like TC using the hp's smartwebprinting solution, or whatever better solutions... to print a post from RWW has been nightmare.. (or, would some kind souls point me to how you'll print a post in general -- other than screen capturing).. thanks, /ac.
Posted by: Aaron Cheung | December 13, 2007 11:06 PMI'd suggest soup.io, aggregating your online activities now that you've joined so many networks and subscribed to so many communication tools.
Posted by: NatC | December 14, 2007 1:40 AMAnd it's classy.
An example here: http://reiner.soup.io/
And my favorite (partially in French): http://www.artefact.ch/
I would nominate zebtab. Twitter is great for getting updates from your friends and contacts and zebtab is great for doing the same with your favourite content.
Posted by: Mike Oxley | December 14, 2007 6:20 AMI guess its RSS behind the scenes but it simlply keeps you uptodate with your favourite content.
techrigy.com
Most of your recent winners have been web 2.0 sites that hit it big. Why not a web 2.0 site that monitors them? At some point it's going to have to happen with twitter like start ups popping up every day.
Posted by: Devin Shane | December 14, 2007 6:56 AMwww.video.sh will be a top domain for video share site.
Posted by: Shawn | December 14, 2007 7:33 AMhttp://www.ning.com.
I've started a network for my neighborhood on Ning. We've got 137 people signed up. But there are so many "real world" social networks that exist that will not be addressed by monolithic sites such as FB or MySpace. Whoever figures out how to connect the people who aren't on those sites has a huge upside. Granted, Ning has a long way to go, but that's why it's called "Most Promising," right?
Posted by: Ryan | December 14, 2007 8:33 AMThin clients will be bigger. There's a technology called PC over IP by Teradici that beams a desktop from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. This way, an expert can configure an excellent, secure computing environment and broadcast it. It could be continually updated. This is all possible because the technology compresses video so it can be sent over the Internet. It delivers a desktop in real time. This would solve the problem of delivering rich media. You could stream full hd. The power savings are great, too. The desktop itself will be yet one more thing that gets webified.
Posted by: Coleman Foley | December 18, 2007 1:52 AMI think it would be cheap to only nominate myself, and really isn't what this is about. My nomination is for:
http://www.Mahalo.com
Mahalo has really come a far way this year, and while I don't think it is necessarily quite what Jason wants it to be the progress it has made is astounding. A ton of people are using it, and its traffic continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Hearing Jason speak at UCLA I can see his passion for it, and in 2008 and beyond I really see it being even more disruptive in the world of Search.
As some others have done I shall nominate my company as well:
http://www.ReimagineMemories.com
I think we are really working towards something quite disruptive. Being able to bridge the gap between analog and digital media by not only supporting. We have a ways to go, but in 2008 we have a lot of features that I can't wait to debut. We have seen many people adopt our service and just turned profitable.
Posted by: Brad Jashinsky | December 18, 2007 7:08 PMTwitter is the new black. Or at least a sexy way to mini-blog. Nice on the nomination. Send me your feeds so I can follow you!
Posted by: Katrina Joy Plam | December 21, 2007 9:17 PMhttp://twitter.com/NikitaScene