My work blog. Social Computing with Agile Software Delivery. See also
my personal blog.
Howard asked me today what my top 10 Web 2.0 apps were, and why they were killer. A good question. Here they are anyway.
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Web 2.0 site
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Killer feature (primary
reason: UGC, RIA)
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Digg.com
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UGC. Blows Slashdot away for interesting geek news by
democratizing the moderation process. Inspired open source tool ‘pligg.com';
I did a proof of concept of pligg at a tacky half day job of a site called Britnews. Yes it crashes a bit. But hey, half a day, cool eh? :)
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Flickr
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UGC. True web 2.0 in action - flickr isn't just about sharing
photos, it's about people's opinions of the photos. In flickr you can create
your own groups, which is really where the ‘network effect' comes in. Check
out ‘Hit Miss or Maybe' - staggeringly addictive group where you rate others'
photos in exchange for still others to rate yours. Warning - it is a serious
time sink.
Also that Flickr has APIs which make for some killer mashups.
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Tripadvisor
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UGC. Trusted source of real experiences with hotels. It really
works; you go to quality places. I've used it lots of times and been inspired
to contribute.
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Ask Metafilter
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UGC. A rabidly active ‘community weblog' about ‘everything'. This
is where I go to answer questions I cannot find answers to. It's the
grandfather of Google Answers etc.
This site embodies the spirit of web 2.0 despite being founded in
1999. See one such question of mine to get a sense of the kind of thing that is still very hard to find.
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Kayak
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RIA. Flight portal ‘Live' price controls - sliders that hone in to the best
flight dynamically. www.kayak.co.uk see also skyscanner for cool 'view price fluctuations over the month' view. Kayak seems to have more airlines.
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Reevoo.com
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UGC. Reviews on products with support for validating the reviews
against real product purchasers - the idea is, the opinions are legitmate
purchasers (through partnerships with online vendors).
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Nestoria
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RIA. Google maps mashup with houses for sale. I hated
findaproperty and other sites because it didn't have the street number. Cuts
through the rubbish about ‘10 minutes to station' when it's clearly 2km
away.
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Wordpress
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UGC (user-generated code J). My favourite
blogging tool. There's an enormous community of extensions including great
spam support, etc etc. Massive, and very easy to use. All for free.
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Technorati
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UGC. One of the key members of the blogosphere. Set itself up to
be the source of changes to blogs by being recipients to the RPC ping service
pioneered by Dave Winer and www.weblogs.com
(I had julian.weblogs.com but sadly it all died).
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Mybloglog
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UGC. Instant blog community on your own site. Drives traffic and
builds a sense of community on a blog almost instantly.
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Honourable mentions
- Reviewcentre.com
I
go here regularly so I have to put it up there but its execution is fairly
lame. For peoples' reviews of products. Kind of like epinions.
- Zopa
P2P moneylending marketplace. Cool idea. Although I'm a
member not had a lot of cash to invest recently but keen to use it when that
opportunity arises.
- Pandora.
Music with opinions. Caches MP3s on your machine so you don't need a 100%
reliable connection. I regularly find lots of stuff it likes. Slick gui
(unnecessarily ‘slidey' however) - it's only part web 2.0 as the core of their
‘dna' is brute force. There are others like iLike etc which are ok but Pandora still brings the great hits to my ears.
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About Julian.RHarris
Passionate technologist and toolbuilder. Music composer and photographer. Deep fascination and participation in the conversation of how technology can aid people become more empowered.