It's a well-known fact that our readers are on the cutting - if not bleeding - edge of technology. But sometimes, it's important to take a step back and realize that the apps to which we've grown so incredibly accustomed are just barely beginning to register with the general public.
With the Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008, we've tried to select the apps that have burst onto the radar of the everyday user this year - or if not quite, then perhaps they will next year.
This was a year - after years of build up - in which two major events had worldwide impact on the Web. These events focused the world's attention, had more consumers creating more online content, and had more people online searching for information than ever before: the Beijing Olympics and the US Presidential elections. Many of these apps have those events to thank for their exposure and adoption.
This is the third in a series of top products of 2008:
Note: We attempted to order this list from most obvious to least obvious.
Twitter is the de facto leader of the microblogging scene, a realm usually rife with witty repartee between leading social media consultants and Web 2.0 developers. But when household names like Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, Al Gore, Shaquille O'Neal, Britney Spears, and politicians across the US started using it, this year, it was clear that our selection as the Best Web LittleCo for 2007 had grown up - and entered the public consciousness.
Twitter was a constant fixture on ReadWriteWeb this year from its use as a source of news to its growing use as a customer service channel. But it wasn't without its hiccups. Midway through the year, Twitter - and its more and more frequent showings of the Fail Whale - was rapidly becoming persona non grata. In June 2008, Amazon's Jeff Bezos poured more cash into the service. And with the US elections, Twitter proved its mettle, becoming a critical forum for debate on the issues at hand.
November 2008 marked the fourth birthday for Firefox, arguably one of the most successful open source projects and clearly the most popular Web browser that users have to actually install. In 2008, more and more of the consumer population gravitated to the browser that strives to deliver the Web the right way.
Firefox has continued to grow in popularity throughout 2008, but it was the download day for Firefox 3 that began to truly turn heads. Site crushing traffic to download a Web browser? Believe it. So much traffic, in fact, that it set a world record. That, and a number of other factors, had Firefox reaching a 20% market share in October of this year.
IntenseDebate - dubbed by RWW as the "the sophisticated blog comment system with the silly name" - provides a commenting add-in for blogs and Web sites that allows users to better manage their profiles and comments across multiple conversations. It also supports OpenID.
In 2008, distributed commenting was still a very young space with no clear leader. But when IntenseDebate appeared as the comment system on US President-elect Barack Obama's change.gov, it stepped into the public eye. Now, thousands of people are using the commenting system. This makes Automattic - the company that manages the development of WordPress - look pretty insightful for acquiring IntenseDebate this year.
If Hulu - a joint video content sharing venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. - is any indication, traditional mainstream media companies are beginning to get this whole "online thing."
And with good reason. In 2008, Hulu shed its ugly duckling image and came into its own and was projected to earn a staggering $90 million in its first year. How? Again, the true turning point was the US elections. Consumers turned to Hulu as much for the political content, as for the satire - like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. Now, consumers are hooked and that affinity for the service is showing no sign of slowing.
Ning is a service designed to help anyone build a social network about anything that interests them. And in 2008, consumers flocked to the site to do exactly that - to the tune of a new social network created every 30 seconds.
As of October 2008, Ning was host to half of a million networks. And it will only continue to grow in the consumer space. Why? Much like Twitter, Ning has begun to attract celebrities who find the service a viable way of interacting with fans. Plus, with its integration of OpenSocial, Ning gains access to tech savvy consumers on a variety of social networks who already understand the dynamic.
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It's a well-known fact that our readers are on the cutting - if not bleeding - edge of technology. But sometimes, it's important to take a step back and realize that the apps to which we've grown so incredibly accustomed are just barely beginning to register with the general public. \n\nWith the Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008, we've tried to select the apps that have burst onto the radar of the everyday user this year - or if not quite, then perhaps they will next year.