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Monday, August 14, 2006
Sites that changed the world
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Web, John Naughton, Web specialist for the London Observer, and fellow staffers offered their list of the 15 Web sites that changed the world. While a couple of their choices take a decidedly British turn, most seem legitimate. They simply list the 15 most-influential sites; they don’t appear to rank them in importance.
1. eBay (auction and shopping)
2. Wikipedia (online encyclopedia)
3. Napster (file sharing)
4. Youtube (video sharing)
5. Blogger (blogging)
6. FriendsReunited (a popular U.K. school-reunion site)
7. DrudgeReport (news site)
8. MySpace (social networking site)
9. Amazon (online retailer)
10. Slashdot (tech news and forum)
11. Salon (online magazine)
12. Craigslist (community and classifieds)
13. Google (search and media corporation)
14. Yahoo! (portal and media corporation)
15. Easyjet (a low-cost British airline)
I have my own favorites, but let’s leave it to you.
What sites do you think should be on the list? What sites are they missing? What are your choices for the 15 most-influential sites of all time?
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Web 2.0 all over the world
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Who says all the best ideas in the online world come out of Silicon Valley or Redmond, Wash.?
As an excellent article in Business 2.0 points out, innovation online can be found all over the world. Ever hear of MyHeritage, an Israeli site which mixes geneaology with face-recognition software? Or Cyworld, the largest social network in Asia, which could compete against MySpace? Or did you know that Iceland is a heavily wired nation, with a number of growing startups?
The Business 2.0 folks assembled a group of 23 companies, dividing them into six categories — social networks, social media (user-generated content like Flickr), browser-based applications, content aggregators, mashups (sites that add, for example, Google Maps to functionality), and Internet TV (like YouTube).
South Africa’s Muti takes the Digg model of users ranking news stories one step further by adding Google Maps to the stories. In cases like Muti, companies are simply taking core technologies and making them better. But, in all cases, the user wins.
Meanwhile, back in Mountain View, Calif., the folks at Google last week made a couple of video moves that drew notice. They added a Video category to their simple homepage search navigation, joining Web, Images, News, Maps and a “more” dropdown box. Froogle joined Books, Groups and an “even more” link in the dropdown box.
Google obviously wanted more traffic as it continues to test an ad program for its video services. It worked. Traffic to Google Video reportedly more than doubled the first day the link was placed.
Google on Friday also made it easier to find movie trailers. If you type in a movie title and city, the first search results are the movie trailer, reviews and locations where the movie is playing.
These moves aren’t innovative; they’re based on the bottom line. However, when Google comes out with something cool again — and you know they will — who knows what startup will take the innovation and turn it into something better, or even completely new?
And that startup could be anywhere.
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