2007: Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without
Michael Arrington
211 comments »
A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that I’m updating the list this year.
Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:
800-Free-411
Jingle’s free 411 service has saved me a serious amount of cash this last year. They now account for over 3% of the U.S. market for information calls, and AT&T has announced that they are going to copy them. That’s good news for consumers, who have to pay up to $3.50 per 411 call today. Our coverage is here.
Amie Street
Amie Street, which launched in July, has a brilliant DRM-free music sales model. Bands upload music, which can then be downloaded for free by users. As songs become popular, the site starts to charge for it. They start at $0.01 and go up to $0.99. Users looking for popular new stuff go right to the more expensive songs. More adventurous types try out lots of new music. I’m somewhere in the middle. This free-market place to set the value of DRM-free digital music could be the future. Our coverage is here.
Ask City
Bloglines dropped off the list this year, but another Ask.com property, the recently launched Ask City, has been added. In our very subjective opinion Ask City has replaced Yahoo Maps as the best mapping product on the Internet. My favorite features are multipoint directions an the annotation tools that allow you to draw and write on a map before forwarding to friends. Ask City is less than a month old and it’s already one of our favorite apps. Our writeup is here.
BlueDot
BlueDot is a social bookmarking service that is similar to del.icio.us. I’ve started using it instead of del.icio.us becasue I like the interface better and it allows sharing of bookmarks just among friends, whereas with del.icio.us you have to choose between fully public and fully private bookmarks. The company launched in July and had an update in October.
Digg
Anyone who reads this blog knows my position on Digg, where users pick what news makes it to the home page. It’s the future of news, and the most disruptive force to mainstream media since blogs were born. Digg has to continue to battle spam while pleasing its most active users, which won’t be easy. But I use the Digg site every day. Our coverage of Digg is here.
Flickr
Flickr is our first holdover from last year’s list. In the last year we’ve seen a bunch of startups gunning for Flickr, but as of now it is still the photo tagging and sharing site that we use every day. The new geotagging feature is incredible. We’d like to see facial recognition, similar to what Ookles is doing, next. Our coverage of Flickr is here.
Flock
We’ve been fans of Flock since we first started covering it during the original Bar Camp in August 2005. It just feels like a complete ecosystem rather than the hodge podge of sometimes incompatible additional add-ons that you get with Firefox. If Flock didn’t exist I’d be a happy Firefox user, but it does, and I use it as my primary browser. The rumor is that they have a big new release coming very soon. Our coverage of Flock is here.
Gmail
Despite recent problems, I think Gmail is now at least as functional as most desktop email applications (like Outlook and Mac Mail), and darn close to perfect. The reason? Lots of storage, the ability to tag emails and the recent addition of POP access to other email accounts. All for the great price of - free.
NetNewsWire
I’ve used NewsGator’s NetNewsWire desktop feed reader from the moment I switched to a Mac in early 2006. It’s not free, but having fast and offline access to feeds was worth the $30 I paid for it. Bloglines dropped off the list because of NetNewsWire, although I expect to be moving over to Google Reader in the near future. Offline access is less important now that I have EVDO cellular access, and Google Reader made significant improvements to its product in its September upgrade.
Netvibes
Netvibes is another holdover from last year. We go there multiple times per day to get a quick overview of a few important feeds. The company continues to gain users at a torrid pace, and has plenty of money in the bank after a $15 million round earlier this year. My guess is Netvibes is fending off multiple acquisition offers at this point, and may not be an independent entity at the end of 2007. Our coverage of Netvibes is here.
Pandora
Pandora is yet another holdover from last year, and a company that we’ve covered since before its launch in 2005. My bet is that I’ve racked up more hours listening to music on Pandora than any other user - it’s almost always playing while I write. Millions of loyal users agree with me. Our coverage is here.
Skype
Skype may be the single biggest productivity booster since email. I use it as my primary instant messaging client, and of course for free on the fly calls almost daily. Skype is one of the Internet’s killer apps. Our coverage of Skype is here.
Techmeme
TechMeme is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. Stuff on TechMeme hits the New York Times and other newspapers days later. My father is as addicted to Techmeme’s political sister site, Memorandum, as I am to the technology news area. Our coverage of TechMeme is here and here.
Wordpress
We’ve been mostly happy customers of Wordpress since TechCrunch started. It’s the most flexible blogging platform, and their Akismet comment spam blocking service has saved us from nearly 1 million spammy comments. We’d have to hire a full time person just to moderate comments and trackbacks if Akismet wasn’t as good as it is. Our coverage of Wordpress is here.
YouTube
YouTube is far from being a young startup, having been acquired by Google for $1.65 billion earlier this year. And even though they sent us a cease & desist letter just two months ago, we remain YouTube addicts. Fire Engines! Bananas! Humanity is a beautiful thing. Earlier YouTube coverage is here.
Almost on the List
A few companies almost made the list as well - AllOfMP3, AllPeers, Last.fm, Meebo, Wikipedia and Zoho were right on the edge, as well as others. I just had to cut the list off somewhere.
Agree? Disagree? Tell me all about it in the comments.
You included Ask City, but try using it outside of the United States, then you’ll think twice
Why you put pandora.com and didn’t include last.fm?
Great list! I work in the design industry and I use Skype and Wordpress on a daily basis. I’d also have to add http://www.mediafire.com to that list too as I’m constantly moving large psd’s and images to and from work as well as clients.
OMG
Please Please PLEASE give an option to turn off those fucking Snap popups. Most annoying thing ever.
Great list Mike, although some of those can’t be used in Europe yet.
John i would agree on mediafire except it looks like they decided to block certain countries….DivShare.com is a killer too
Not sure about Flock. I prefer Maxthon.com
The snap popups are very annoying.
I do believe you can turn them off though the snap site.
http://real.snap.com/about/spa.....able_spa=1
It does not work with Opera … you could try it out for other browsers.
Great list but i agree with the comments about some of them (ask city esp) which are very us-centric.
I personally would have added swamii.com. I use it instead of a news reader (it found this article for me)
You’ve got a typo in techmeme’s url. (http://www.techmeme.coms/ => http://www.techmeme.com/)
(feel free to remove this comment)
P Kumar, thanks for the link to set a cookie to disable those snap popups. While indeed a preview is handy - what annoyed me was the popup often got in the way when you were wanting to click the actual link.
The disable cookie seems to have worked for me (Mac/Firefox 2.0).
Great list. Make it even better when you correct the link to techmeme.com Currently you are linking to http://www.techmeme.coms/
thanks for pointing out the typo. fixed it.
Definitely agree with Gmail, Flickr, Digg and YouTube; not so much the others.
All in all, its a great list. My favorites are Pandora and Wordpress.
Two notes:
1. Yahoo mail has dramatically improved. Its functionality is also similar to that of a desktop application. I think its a fine competitor to Gmail.
2. Youtube is the most popular video sharing site, and I’ve already heard some people using Youtube as a verb. But Google (not always not evil) owned Youtube has some good competitors who pay more respect to their users. Some of them also pay their users for original content: Metacafe, Revver, Brightcove, and maybe others. Verizon charges $15 per month for Youtube content, without paying users…
YouTube, Wordpress, Netvibes, Gmail are in my list. I can’t think web 2.0 without them. I am wondering what will happen on net in 2007… thinking it makes me excited!
Totally agree with that list except i’ve recently swapped both netvibes and NetNewsWire for Google Reader which has blown me away - I love it.
Yeah I’d say that list is on the money. Nice one. Be interested to see what 2007 holds for us.
Congrats for not choosing MySpace
Still, David is right. I strongly recommend last.fm
So Michael, are there any predictions or wants for 2007?
Web 2.0 . . the biggest hype since jesus christ
Interesting to note the lack of business apps and that online one app is outside the browser - Skype. Except Flock of course which IS a browser
I find it interesting that you use the phrase “couldn’t live without” despite the fact that you dropped almost half your list in less than a year.
Perhaps this is a lesson to investors. Despite something being “hot” right now most of these companies will be forgotten by next year so unless the company is brining in boatloads of money *right now* the investors will most likely loose their shirts while the company execs will be laughing all the way to the bank.
What about stumbleupon.com
Mikee how could you forget Filmator.net
Yeah, I wish you added some instant messaging applications such as Interaction Chat (www.interactionchat.com) or MeeboMe (www.meebome.com). Also you could have put these online office suites such as Google Docs (docs.google.com) which has marked 2006.
I still find YouTube and all of the other video sites useless. The quality of the videos is just too low for my taste.
I like Netvibes a lot, so much I have a home grown version - http://www.myownsite.us
Flickr I would easily replace with http://www.fotki.com which also has the geotagging, 10 methods of uploading, private, public, and password protected albums, journals, and much, much more.
you forgot about http://Snoozester.com the web 2.0 wake up calls
I suggest you to take a look at the following addres for a real web 2.0 framework.
http://www.benbuldum.com
I’ve found several of the 37signals apps to be very useful, although not “I couldn’t live without” level, particularly campfire.
If you use flickr and you like youtube, and if you believe in high quality content, then watch http://www.sevenload.com this year!
Three sites I don’t go through any day without.
http://www.goowy.com for email along with bloglines and flickr
Hey great list, I just started using 1800-411-search last week and I also made the switch from netnewswire to google reader.
Replace digg w/ reddit. Digg is full of bad posts, an awkward ranking system, mediocre design, and obnoxious users. Reddit has a fantastic recommendation engine, clean design, slighly less obnoxious users, and a transparent ranking system.
If I am not mistaken Wordpress link is broken. It is taking me to another website. Instead of http://www.wordpress.org you should point to wordpress.org
Regards
That’s a really utilitarian list. I suppose that’s alright, but it’s a little underwhelming. Perhaps a list of what’s on the Web that would change life in general would be more impressive…
If the Times ran a feature on 2007 products that we couldn’t live without, and focusing on productivity boosters and ignored clean-water purifiers, micro-loans, etc wouldn’t it be a little disappointing? Not saying you’re the Times, but can’t find you find a slightly big-picture view of the Web to report on? (Or is this an indictment of the Web?)
Good list, although I echo the US centric view.
My can’t live withouts are:
- Gmail, including Blackberry Gmail app
- Google reader
- Backpackit
- Google calendar
- gcalsync (syncs Google calendar to my Blackberry calendar)
- Wordpress
- Windows Live Writer beta
Here are a few other notables:
MyBlogLog, Gizmo, JaJah, Compete, LogMeIn, SoonR, Mail2Web, Sitemeter (not Web 2.0 but used by them so much)
In the beginning there was resistance, lots of resistance. Then after a couple of high profile sellouts their was panic, every speculator was going to be rich, quickly followed by the big bang. What a ride.
What caused the last big bang is about to cause the next even the mainstream press can feel it. But this time the big balled investors are a little more cautious than before, yet it seems just as stupid.
I recall one of the first bangers Lastminute.com in a high profile sellout got 850 million UKP, valuing Lastminute on a par with W.H.SMITHs. This was for a little domain name that they picked up for 10 dollars, a couple of PHP coders, and a double page spread in the Daily Mail singing their praises. What a scam.
After that everyone was hooked and they were all going to be rich. Overnight the internet changed from being a bit geeky, very innovative, and strictly non-commercial to one big supermarket with every vender spamming you with their latest rubbish.
Of course it went pop, and when it did it was great. For all the commercial interests that were polluting cyberspace with their get rich quick spam, had had their balls crushed and in the aftermath we were left with a much quieter terrain where the speculators had been burnt and innovation could once again flourish.
Don get me wrong I have nothing against making money but the nature of these speculators have a very negative impact on the general terrain of the internet and heres why.
Firstly the vast majority of the venture capital investment that is injected into startups is used to not only prop up donkeys but more importantly is distorting the general playing field.
This manifests in some very destructive ways. Noticeably, most of the real innovation that is at the core of the new functions that emerge online, is created by small groups of programmers / designers who tackle problems and create ingenues solutions which enrich our everyday lives. These are largely small groups of underfunded (if at all) individuals.
Coupled with this parody is the power of the press, and I’m not talking about the mainstream press I am referring to the new breed of Power-Ranger blogers who just like in the days of the specific industry related ‘trade magazines’ are the current imbeciles of their time.
So you have a small group of technology related Blogers who have managed to harness a captive audience but who are ignorant to programming, design, and largely technology for that matter but who have found themselves with the ‘important’ title of chef bloger, and who make it their business to blog about what they consider is newsworthy or important.
Just as with the old trade press journals you are left with a corporatised view on the world where the dinner table talk ranges from who’s been fired to who’s just managed to get VC to the tune of 568 million.
Clearly this is the scope of the general table chatter and a brief look at Michael Arrington Techcrunch you will see the same old traditional trade journal style of so-called news (hysteria) being covered.
But burred by these trade like journals is the real startup discussion. The real news is not in who’s about to loose 586 Million because they have invested it into a pile of donkey shit but rather what’s happening on the ground.
The innovative ground floor is once again being crushed by an ambitious bunch of ignorant money grabbing speculators who in their hysteria do not know the value of a domain name let alone an online travel agent.
This is not to say that innovation will stop or the current wave of Web2.0 startups won’t flourish as some will, but the survivors of the next big bang wont be the those empty black holes who are being jacked up by VC, instead they will be the the low profile (unfunded) innovators who continue at their own pace despite the noise of what’s supposed to be hot, in the race to be a me-too copycat company.
Try adding techcrunch2skype as Skype contact, then chat ‘hi’ to it, is this a useful blend of 2 on your list (ie skype and the newsreader ?).
My favorites are gmail, google reader, and google calendar. For a browser, I use Flock on the Mac and Maxthon on the PC. I love the connection to my blog and to Flickr from Flock, but the tabbed browing on Maxthon is better.
I would’ve loved seen you put them in order.
My very favorite: Flock.
U missed the del.icio.us….
HI Mike,
Nice list. Two that would be on my list are.
a) Farecast.com. I use it to book flights. its got a better inteface than kayak and it is tells you if a fare will increase or decrease. While I dont use it everyday, I do use it whenever I want to travel.
b) Windows Live Mobile Search -great for checking out trafffic conditions while commuting as well as for directions on the road.
HI Mike,
Nice list. Three that would be on my list are.
a) Farecast.com. I use it to book flights. its got a better inteface than kayak and it is tells you if a fare will increase or decrease. While I dont use it everyday, I do use it whenever I want to travel.
b) Windows Live Mobile Search -great for checking out trafffic conditions while commuting as well as for directions on the road.
c) Picassa . A great photo storage/managment site gets better with the ability to seamlessly sync pictures with the web.I used to use Sharpcast but Picassa overall has better features.
Good work! But I really prefer Last.fm to Pandora, o think it is more socially oriented and better in musical suggestion.
fredo
My 2007 list (that you have missed):
MS Live Messenger (better than skype?)
Maxthon (browser)
http://www.swamii.com
http://www.stumbleupon.com
FYI: There’s a typo in the Wordpress link. It should be wordpress.org but the “p” is left out.
I use daily and addictivly http://www.remeberthemilk.com
and simply because the ease of use, and the possibilities of reminders (I use it as a gtalk friend).
Thank you for the list
Its interesting to see a lack of mobile sites\apps on the list. I think there is a progression towards using these services via a mobile device, but we are not there yet. Each of these services is developing a mobile version for phones\PDA’s but there has to be significant innovation before they truly go mainstream. I think a large barrier to this innovation is the price of wireless internet access in the US and elsewhere. As these services begin to have better wireless versions and prices go down as the speeds go up - we will see a different focus next year. Thats my two cents.
It is surprising that Meebo did not enter the primary list. And Word Press deserves being in the List.
For me Ofcourse Google Reader would be a part of primary list along with Digg.com
You should definitely start a voting process for this. now that ur post is on the front page of Digg.
For me it would be - Feedburner - they should count as Web 2.0 right?
what about Torrop (www.torrop.com)
and Legit Torrents (www.virtenu.com/lt)
by what means Skype is Web 2.0 company? As long as I know they have very small part of the service in web (and this is very 1.0). Skype is great software and Internet service, but if every nice service or soft in Internet is called Web 2.0 then it would be a bit too broad definition of web 2.0
last.fm rocks my world… if you’re into music then the cheap-ass subscription fee is a no-brainer. My fave web app of last year, based on usage X joy.
serence and their klipfolio rss(etc) solution, for me.
it’s super.
happy new year to one and all!
Just thought I would say I like your choiece although a little American bias still no surprise there.
Out of the list I use skype Flickr wordpress and netvibes which when you consider the competition I still think its the best and no wonder people are after a slice!
Not gonna lie… I switched over to Window’s Live Search for the most part.
My ISP has given us an IP address which Google perceives as a Canadian address. All of my search results are geared towards Canadian users (mostly *.ca sites). Instead of trying to configure Google to realize that I’m in the United States, I simply switched to Window’s Live Search.
Go figure, I switched because of a “feature”
I like the suggestions in the comments. I would add http://www.bugmenot.com/
http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php
http://video.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.blogmusik.net/
One site I couldn’t live without would have to be techcrunch.
Akismet is very good, but I don’t think it’s much safe to rely only on it, especially when having 100+ comments a day.
You can have tons of ham (human comments) wrongly recognized spam by the famous wordpress plugin, and that’s not much fair for users, who haven’t got any sign their comment has been sent or whatsoever.
But that’s just my opinion…
I’ve recently switched off Google completely. I swapped Gmail and Google Calendar for http://www.inbox.com (5GB instead of 2.8, plus calendar, notes, and file and photo storage), Google Reader for http://www.newsalloy.com, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets for http://www.foldera.com.
Pandora? Totally disagree. I really like finetune.com. Its the best internet radio site that I’ve found.
more web 2.0 innovations at: http://web2innovations.com
DoHowTo has every software how-to video I can think of. 450 for photoshop alone. Search it for specific things, or just browse to learn.
I don’t see Skype as “Web 2.0″. What’s Web 2.0 about a platform-specific binary application that uses a closed, proprietary protocol and doesn’t implement Internet standards? That’s exactly the opposite of what Web 2.0 is about.
Allofmp3? So do you publicly state that you have downloaded illegal music from their site? hmm
Web 2.0 is centered around the user. It’s about innovating ideas. In fact, I would venture to say that the definition of “Web 2.0″ is ambiguous. Therefore, how can you (or anyone else) say that Skype ISN’T “Web 2.0″ when you don’t even know the definition?
Mike Arrington - when are we going to have that poll to define “Web 2.0″?
Nice List. Will have to give Askcity a try.
Why did Last.fm fall short Mike? I wish it had a bit more breadth on the fringes of my taste (see my blog post including Andy Mckee if you care to learn more) or is there another reason?
ok, and how much did they pay to u?
Michael, As a long-time lurker and user of TechCrunch 411, thanks for being such a great information source! I had to add my $.02 on Skype and see if others agree/disagree. Skype has had the potential to be a great disruptor of traditional pay-for-voice services but they are failing on the quality front IMO. I’ve noticed that if you make PC-to-landline calls the quality is quite good, but if you use PC-to-PC calls, especially their conference capability (which I love conceptually) the quality is crap/unusable. We’ve attempted many times to use Skype as our conference call tool for our company with too much frustration to continue even with just 3 users. Seems that their prioritization of pure VoIP traffic is much lower than that of their “for-pay” voice services.
I find it interesting that you use the phrase “couldn’t live without” despite the fact that you dropped almost half your list in less than a year.
Excellent point. It sounds to me more like you’ve got a list of certain needs — like listening to music, tracking feeds, making phone calls, mapping — that are the real “can’t live without” activities. However, the tools that you use to meet those needs are rather fungible.
Hi Mike, nice list, a real hot list !!
I send you two new options:
1. Google Calendar (I am very pleased)
2. http://www.orsai.es (a very interesting blog whit free spanish content)
Best for you and your team for this new year !
Robert…
Web 2.0 is not an actual “thing” and therefore it cannot be defined. It is a buzz word created to make money. Nothing more.
When the bubble popped, no one wanted to invest in companies that do not make money. This was a huge problem for all of those people/compaines that do not know how to make money…so…the term “web 2.0″ was coined and hyped…and once again, people and companies that do not/cannot make money are able to raise capital.
If web 1.0 refers to companies that could not make money on the Internet - I would think the proper definition for web 2.0 would/should be something like this: A company that has figured out how to make money/profit on the Internet.
I can open a massive warehouse and sell LCD TV’s for 50% less than Best Buy…I will fill every isle with shoppers and turn over tons of invetory every day…but If I am losing money on every customer - my company is worthless.
I am not saying that tons of these companies could/will not be profitable…but if they cannot make money - they are very “1.0″
A neat list. Following would make into my list,
digg
flickr
gmail
pandora
skype
wordpress
youtube
I still wonder how gmail made it into Mike’s list
Michael,
I enjoyed reading your list. I am curious as to what you think about Me.dium’s service (http://me.dium.com/from/8025bc7). I’ve been using it since the TechCrunch Party in NYC, and find it to be a user-friendly and easy-to-use tool that many people can benefit from!
After looking at your list I’d of only edited it a little:
Under GMail I would of just said many of Google Apps, as I use gmail (http://www.gmail.com), Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader), GCal (http://calendar.google.com) all the time, and I’ve even found Docs (http://docs.google.com) to work out pretty good for a few of the projects I needed it for.
StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com) has been great for finding interesting, entertaining and cool sites.
Meebo (http://www.meebo.com) I use ALL the time, and would of placed it higher on the list. (Rather hen just honorable mention)
While not an app that I actively seekout every day, I do know that snap.com’s product will be something that we all use directly or indirectly as the popularity of their service continues to surge.
Great list. You should include Media Temple because without them you LITERALLY couldn’t live without.
^ Hey Sean - get any lake homes or cabins for Christmas that you don’t want? You can sell them at LakePlace.com - sell your unwanted lake homes & lakefront mansions! ($30k-$17M)
Pandora was the best service out of those for me
Josh Chandler
http://www.techoriphic.wordpress.com
I would watch out for KushCash. I predict that mobile wallets systems will blow up in ‘07. We have the cell phone, now mp3 phone, now the mobile wallet. KushCash is the leader in mobile payments. Booya!
I just installed KushCash. Now i just need to make my friends send me money!! This stuff is really cool. Can’t wait for this to take off!!!
Man, Michael I feel for you. It’s be hard to distinguish the spam from the ham in all these messages. As for the ones to look for in 2007, I think we’ll be surprised if it’s one of these randomly posted in comments.
Michael, I understand Akismet is not a silver bullet - I’ve seen 4 spammers messages just in this post comments.
I am sure that you sometimes must visit StyleDiary.net for fashion insight!
I want to love WordPress but no matter what I do, it won’t allow me to post things to my blog - I spend an hour writing, try to publish it, save it, you name it and it DELETES IT. Anybody know how to fix this?
Is it really spam to plug your own company? If it’s on topic and pertinent, how’s that spam?
Definitely agree with Skype…but m