2008 has seen a proliferation of new Web platforms, including a few major ones built using open standards. In this final instalment of our series of top products of 2008, we choose the top 10 Web platforms of the year.
We've written a lot of times about platforms for the Web. A web platform can be as simple as an API, like the one offered by Twitter, which allows external developers to tap into a company's data. It can be software and services, like Amazon's Web Services. It can also be a fully fledged development platform, such as iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR. Whatever the case, platforms on the Web mean allow people to build on top of another company's product, so we think it's an appropriate way to close our Top Web Products series.
This is the tenth and final post in ReadWriteWeb's series of top products of 2008. Here are the previous nine:
Note: unlike some of our previous lists, we've attempted to order this one according to impact in 2008.
ReadWriteWeb named Apple as our Best BigCo of 2008, largely due to the iPhone platform. The iPhone truely reached a mainstream audience in 2008, when the 3G iPhone was launched to much acclaim in July. But more significant than the phone itself was the simultaneous launch of the Apple App Store. There were 552 applications available at launch and at time of writing that's risen to over 10,000 applications. So in less than 6 months, the number and variety of iPhone apps has expanded greatly. Indeed, any startup worth its salt has an iPhone version of its web app - the ultimate proof of a successful Web platform.
For many years now everybody (including us) has been predicting that the next year will be the one that the Mobile Web breaks through. 2008 was finally that year - and it's mostly thanks to the iPhone development platform.
November was the first anniversary of Google's OpenSocial, an open API framework for social networks and websites. During 2008 OpenSocial gained a lot of traction; statistics released in November stated that OpenSocial had reached 675 M registered users at that time and there were 7,500 applications.
Most impressive is the list of organizations who signed onto OpenSocial and are actively developing apps for it. That high powered list includes MySpace, AOL, Bebo, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft, but at the rate OpenSocial is ramping up - they may not need them.
As we noted in our Best BigCo 2008 post, this was a year in which Adobe's 'Rich Internet App' strategy bore some juicy fruit, with many compelling apps released that were built using AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). AIR is a platform that makes it easy to build attractive Internet connected applications that live outside the browser. Last year we noted its potential - AIR was called 'Apollo' for much of its beta - but in February 2008 AIR was officially launched and soon we saw a lot of stunning apps emerge. For examples, check out:
We've named it our number 3 Web platform of the year, because it breathed new life into Rich Internet Apps this year.
The importance of Twitter's API to its success this year can't be overstated. The number and variety of Twitter reader clients alone is amazing, let alone the many other ways Twitter's data is being used (e.g. for e-commerce purposes). It must be said that Twitter has experienced much downtime and many technical glitches throughout the year, but even so it has continued to expand its API service. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said a ReadWriteTalk interview last September:
"The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas ...
So the API, which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We've seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com, which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone's doing around the world with Twitter. ... The [Twitter] API has really been a big success for us, and it's something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward."
Facebook continued to become more popular throughout 2008, reaching 140 million active users by end of the year and growing at a rate of 600,000 users each day. For that reason we gave it an honorable mention in our Best BigCo 2008 post.
However in terms of the Facebook platform, overall we felt that Google's OpenSocial overshadowed it in 2008. As we wrote in our mid-year review, Facebook Platform: The Fanfare Revisited, when the Facebook platform debuted last year it was touted as the next big thing. You no longer needed to bring the audience to your app. Instead your app could be delivered to one of the largest audiences around the web. And not just delivered, but injected into a massive social network. But while it started great, it turns out things are not that simple. Three fundamental issues surfaced:
Despite these issues, Facebook's platform shows no signs of slowing and many startups have ported their web apps to Facebook. It may not be the bee's knees anymore, but it's still a very effective platform for startups to utilize.
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2008 has seen a proliferation of new Web platforms, including a few major ones built using open standards. In this final instalment of our series of