Webware100

Site: Woot.com
Category: Commerce

Woot is an online retailer of goods. Most of the items sold are electronics, although you never know what will be next. The site sells a new product every night at midnight Central time and will keep it available until the next night or until it sells out.

Unsold goods are then later sold (usually at a discount) in what's called a Woot-off, where the retailer continues to sell new or previously listed goods until it runs out of stock, replacing it with other items. Woot-offs are well known for ending with the notorious "more

Site: OAuth
Category: Editors' Choice, Most Important Technology

OAuth is a developing standard that lets Web services interact with each other on behalf of users, without requiring users to give up their passwords.

Why do we need it? Best reason that makes it clear to almost everyone: Twitter apps. Currently, when you're using a third-party Twitter application, like Tweetdeck for example, you have to give the app your Twitter credentials--user name and password. That's a key to your entire Twitter account. An app like Tweetdeck could, if hacked or written maliciously, log in to your Twitter account and more

Site: Amazon Web Services
Category: Editors' Choice, Start-up's Friend

How can a bunch of kids in a garage create a Web service that half the people on the planet can use at once? By running their app on the cloud computing platform from Amazon Web Services instead of on their own servers.

Amazon Web Services, a collection of services include a computing engine, a database, and storage services, were created to be easy to provision (set up), and to scale as needed. The real benefit is that the developer doesn't pay for services delivered until they are. So more

Site: Aviary
Category: Editors' Choice, Technical Achievement

Aviary started as a photo editor built into a browser, but since we first covered the app its developers have rolled out a vector editor, a color palette editor, and a tool for creating visual effects. All are delivered through Flash apps in a Web browser. The apps force you to reconsider ever using traditional software again.

The Aviary team also built in unique collaboration dn remixing tools, so artists can lend and borrow graphics and maintain intellectual property rights in the process.

Site: GoodGuide
Category: Editors' Choice, Best Newcomer

We created the Editors' Choice awards for products like this: Small and relatively unknown products that demonstrate real leadership, but that don't yet have enough traction to win in the user vote part of the Webware 100.

GoodGuide is a product recommendation system focused on "safe, healthy, and green products." It will tell you what chemicals are in your toothpaste, or if your socks are made with sweatshop labor.

The company's real value add is in acquiring the data on the products. There's an iPhone app for the service as more

Site: Cuil and Mobile Me
Category: Editors' Choice, Failure to Launch

A lot of Web services fizzle on launch. The "beta" label often provides a line of defense against launch hiccups. But every now and then companies overhype new products that simply aren't close to ready for prime-time launch. The two big winners of the Failure to Launch award for this Webware 100 are, clearly, Cuil and Mobile Me.

Cuil as launched as a competitive search engine to Google, built by ex-Googlers. Early demos looked good, but when the site actually opened to the public, it was a flop.

Site: Search.twitter.com
Category: Editors' Choice; Look out, Google

Twitter itself is fun. Twitter Search, though, is another thing entirely. Twitter Search provides real-time search results on timely issues and news that even Google can't touch. It's this feature, not the Twitter social network, that could end up being Twitter's true path to revenue, as well as the feature that knocks Google off its peg as the master of all search.

Even Google execs have acknowledged that dealing with real-time search is one of the company's most important challenges. Twitter has stuck a pin in more

Site: Present.ly
Category: Editors' Choice, Best Twitter Rip-off

Everyone wants to build a better Twitter. Or at least a profitable version of it. The best microblogging service other than the original is Present.ly, a microblog service for businesses. Present.ly launched with features that Twitter still lacks for business users. It lets users attach files, for example, and set up groups easily, which is great for teams.

Also, Present.ly is available as installable software, as well as in a hosted service. That means that all those paranoid IT managers who want to make their teams happy by more

Site: Google Voice
Category: Editors' Choice, Oncoming Train award

The giant telecom industry is about to meet another giant force: Google. Its new telephony service is a real threat to traditional phone systems. Google Voice gets the "Oncoming Train" award since it's the product most likely to disturb existing services and companies.

While at the moment Google Voice needs existing phone networks to function, there's reason to believe the company will at some point begin offering phone service of its own, or at the very least work with mobile carriers (as it is with its Android mobile phone more