Best Web 2.0 Web Sites – June 2007

Back in October of 2006 we posted the Best of the Best Web 2.0 Web Site List.  This was intended more than anything to keep track of the most useful and most impressive Web 2.0 Web Sites on the Internet.  Since the original list, a whole slew of new Web 2.0 Sites have cropped up.  Every month now we will feature a “Best Web 2.0 Web Sites” for the month.  Below is our listing of the Best Web 2.0 Web Sites for the month of June 2007!  Enjoy and leave your comments!


  1. This web 2.0 application is sheer genius, and the poster child for social networking done right!  The interface is so easy to use, it’s addictive.  This is what every true web 2.0 application strives to be.  Allowing its users to easily customize their facebook page, while at the same time keeping all pages consistent and clean.  And now with its recent launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook seems poised to become the backend to all things social network.

  2. The brainchild of Kevin Rose, Digg stormed onto the Internet in 2005 after the Paris Hilton cell phone fiasco helped Digg double its users within a day.
  3. stumbleupon StumbleUpon
    Sometimes you just want to “stumble” around the Internet, and don’t really know the exact site you want to see, but know the category of site’s you would like to view.  Stumbleupon is a fantastic tool for doing just that.  And on your tour, rank sites up or down based on your likes and dislikes.

  4. Dominating the video space, others have tried to compete with YouTube, including Google with Google Video, however, they have not been successful.  This lead to Google’s purchase of YouTube.  While many other Web 2.0 companies fail to impress, Google continues to add to brand, with a new version in beta and ready to launch any day.  Recently with the addition of YouTube Remixer, YouTube will stay at the forefront of the video webspace for months!
  5. technorati
    Tracking over 85 million blogs and over 350 million pieces of tagged social media, Technorati is the authority on the Internet when it comes to what is happening on the Internet this very second!  Although it started with Blogs, Technorati has recently expanded to all things Live Web!  The best part of Technorati is there ranking system, and their recently launched “WTF”. 
  6. Pageflakes logo
    This is a beautifully designed concept and portal site.  Although some would argue netvibes should be the winner here, in terms of interface and ease to set up, I give Pageflakes the honors hands down.  Type in your location, select your likes and dislikes, and within seconds you have a completely AJAX driven dashboard to keep your slew of websites a simple pageflakes.com away!
  7. Twitter.com
    Twitter attempts to answer the question: “What are you doing?”.  I really didn’t get this at first, but it’s basically a mini-blogging system that allows you to say what you are doing, and have it sent instantly to your friends or “readers” via sms or email.  If they can figure out a way to make money from this, they might have something here.
  8. delicious_42px del.icio.us
    I hate having to keep track of all of my favorites on one computer, and then not having them available on other computers if I’m traveling.  Also, when you find a great site, wouldn’t it help others know what you think is great, or if anyone else already thinks your new bookmark is great?  check out my bookmarks here: http://del.icio.us/miguelcarrasco
  9. dodgeball
    I love this concept!  The Mobile Social Networking King! Imagine being at a bar, or at a restaurant and being instantly notified if a friend is in the area!  Imagine having the ability to message a group of friends that are all in the area, and meet up together!  Dodgeball accomplishes this!  Currently available in 22 states, watch it pick up more steam as it moves across the country, and hopefully soon into Canada.  Hey imagine if this could link in with facebook somehow!

  10. What a great idea, the social networking site for reviews of things in your area.  It makes it really easy for you to review everything from restaurants, to pet stores, to hotels.  Yelp is the ultimate city guide that taps into the community’s voice!  If you want to know what to do, where to go, and where to sleep, check out Yelp today!

Digg Down

imageDigg is down for maintenance, let’s see how long it takes them to bring the site back up.  The title bar actually reads (out of service).  I have actually been really impressed at the uptime that Digg has been able to maintain during the amazing path to web 2.0 stardom.

With the amount of traffic they receive, it will be interesting to see how long it takes them to recover.  While it’s possible they are doing server maintenance, this is usually done without bringing down a site, especially one as popular as Digg.

In the end, Digg came back online about an hour and a half after going down, then went down about two minutes later again.  After checking the blogsphere, some other bloggers have noticed this, and are starting to blog about the outage.  I love the Internet and web sites alike, and I honestly am starting to find the news and television pretty much useless in a day in age where I can find out what is happening this very second on the Internet, however, on the plus side for television, when was the last time that you tuned on the TV to watch the news, and had CNN go down for a few hours?

Digg seems to finally be stable and back up.  The outage lasted over 2 and a half hours.  Oh no wait correction, its back down…

So Digg finally got its act together this morning.  Kevin Rose blogged over at the Digg blog that they are planning on no more Digg outages by having a disaster recovery site set up for Digg, which will allow them to make updates to Digg without interruptions.

Update at 11:45 PM CST: Digg goes back down… who knows at this point what has gone wrong. 

Update at 10:10 PM CST: Digg is back up!  I will be interested to find out what happened!

Update at 9:09 PM CST: Digg goes back down!  Ouch, what could possibly be going on at the Digg power plant? Downtime is nearly approaching two hours.

Update at 9:05PM CST: Digg is back up!  The little guy with the shovel wins!

Update at 8:23 PM CST:  Digg has been down now for nearly an hour.  It was noticed at 7:30 PM CST.  Wonder what has happened.  There were no signs of an update occurring tonight.  Hopefully the Digg man will pick up his shovel.  There is an army of Kevin Rose Diggnation people getting antsy!

Java Not Worth Building In

Steve Jobs with iPhone

“Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain…”

Those were the exact words of Steve Jobs in January of 2007.  You have to keep this statement in context.  Jobs was talking about the portable device market, and the desktop market.  In 2000, Jobs actually made a valiant effort of bringing Java to the desktop with the launch of Mac OSX.  The harsh reality for Java supporters out there is that software developers don’t want to write desktop application in Java.

I mean sure they want to write games, and small applications here and there, but for the most part now, desktop applications are ruled by C, C++, or .net.  For every one (1) Java application released, there are 10 .net, C, or VB applications released.

Java does have its place still in the enterprise market, but they have lost the desktop battle.  The only other “desktop-ish” battle they had a chance to win was the browser battle, but on that battle field, Flash is the master, hands down.  Adobe made a brilliant move in acquiring Macromedia.

When the iPhone is released at the end of the month, it will sport the most sophisticated, well thought user interface ever written for a portable device.  It will not run Java.  This will make the device a hundred times more stable as it will protect people from going to download badly written Java applications onto their mobile phones.  It will force anyone that wants to write an application for the iPhone, to go through Apple.  Here is where many will call fowl, however, I call “hurray!”.  It will start forcing application standards and performance requirements on people!  And this of course is only if Apple decides to open this up.  And they will, once they own the cell phone market and make it the platform for cell phones.

Listen to the D 2007 Conference and watch Steve and Bill chat.  Steve Jobs knows that the mistakes he made in the past were partnerships, or lack thereof. 

“We weren’t so good with partnering with people. Bill and Microsoft were really good at it.”

Look at facebook, they own the social network market (There are others, but for usefulness and most avid users, they win hands down), and have now opened up the development via the facebook API.  This was sheer genius on Mark Zuckerberg’s part!  This will surely catapult facebook into the stratosphere!  Steve Jobs will make the iPhone the cell phone.  Sure there will be others, but the iPhone will capture market share you would not believe when compared to other phones.

 

At the end of the day, people want great software that is fast, easy to use, and performs the way they expect it.  The iPhone will do this, as the iPod did. 

Now what if Apple decides to sell the iPhone “Operating System” to phone companies once they smell defeat…  This could be Apple’s chance to take a road that was once not taken, and saw Microsoft become what Apple could have been.