Webware 100 winners announced!
And now the moment you've all been waiting for... The Webware 100 winners. Go to www.webware.com/100 to see the top 100 Web 2.0 products, 10 each in 10 categories, selected by the Web's users.
The project was a big success for Webware, and for Web users overall. Users cast 489,467 votes on our 250 finalists. Here's more data about the winning Web 2.0 services:
The 90/10 rule
Overall, 91 percent of all votes cast were for winning products.In many categories, there was a very steep drop-off between the top vote-getter and the No. 2 (and lesser) winners. In Browsing, for example, Firefox received 50 percent of all votes in the category, and the second-most-popular product, Opera, got only 13 percent.
The greatest disparity was in the Community category. Gaia Online won a staggering 91,293 votes--60 percent of the votes in its category and 19 percent of all votes cast in the awards.
The categories with the least amount of drop-off--the most even distribution of votes--were Productivity and Publishing. In Productivity, which also included Commerce, there was a block of votes (45 percent of all in the category) fairly evenly distributed among eBay, Amazon, and Paypal. Google Docs and Speadsheets and Google Calendar were in the next positions, and then there was a fairly straight-line drop-off for the remaining five winners in the category.
Publishing had no mass consumer brands in the top 10, as most of the other categories did. WordPress got the most votes. I was interested to see the Drupal CMS platform placing high in this category--above the consumer-oriented publishing products Typepad and Vox. Even combined, these two Six Apart services didn't come close to winning the same number of votes as Drupal.
The top 10 vote winners, which accounted for 45 percent of all votes, were, in alphabetical order:
Everyone's a winner
We made a decision early on that we weren't going to rank the winners. That's why we're not showing the raw results. I didn't think it would reflect fairly on small (but well-loved) products that don't (yet) have the mass appeal of services from larger and older companies. This awards program was, essentially, a popularity contest, but I wanted to give smaller products a chance to dance with the big boys.
Indeed, some products with only a few hundred votes placed in the Webware 100. I'm happy to see them on the list. To my mind they are just as good, and just as loved, as larger products. They're just newer.
There are some large-company products on the under-1,000 list too. They're going to have to do better next year if they want to place. However, we may also modify the voting procedures to account for the fact that in many categories, even very popular products weren't popular enough to win votes from their category's shoe-in. StumbleUpon, for example, only got 784 votes. That's a surprisingly low result, but the service probably lost most of its potential votes to Firefox.
These are the products that received fewer than 1,000 votes:
Blocks of votes
I had no idea how much mass traffic the teen and "tween" demographic could drive. This user base has a tendency to act as a herd--when something is cool for the tastemakers, it becomes cool for everyone, and everyone does the same thing. In this case, that was voting.
Companies that saw the Webware 100 as an opportunity to let their users reward them for a service users liked reaped the benefit. Voting drives from several companies had large effects in the rankings. Communities of fans, likewise, drove votes for several services. However, many user-generated campaigns were short-lived, and while they generated large spikes in votes, did not generate enough to have the desired effect. Fark, for example, took the lead early in the Community category, but did not drive enough sustained votes to place in the top 10. And Digg, despite an enormous spike in voting when the community flagged the awards, did not win as many votes as I had expected, since the item rolled off the page after only a day.
A few companies that I expected to see as winners did not place. Finalist Yelp, for example, did not make it into the top 100. At Webware, we love Yelp, despite a criticism we mentioned recently. We fear that this critique may have turned the Yelp founders and community against us, and we think they boycotted the awards. That's a shame.
Not all voting drives had the desired effect. Several users told us that they were driven to the Webware Awards by a company they liked, but when they saw all their voting options they cast the ballot for another product. That's what we like to see: independent thinking.
We'll be running these awards again for 2008. We already have a list of improvements we plan to make, but if you think the process and the end result could be improved, post your TalkBack here. You can also write to me via this form or directly at rafen@webware.com.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Some ideas and thoughts:
- It would be great to see the actual ranking (maybe in % terms?) - otherwise, it's a bit flat, also it would be terrific to compare how the ranking changes year to year - in 2008 and beyond!
- Would be AWESOME to see the geo distribution (maybe on a map)
- Would be so cool to have these as separate lists for giant companies, VC-funded companies, non-funded companies
- Would be very interesting to compare with Alexa ranking (am sure that some great surprises await there - low traffic sites with fanatical users! - my bet is that these will be big soon since fanatical crowd is what makes it or breaks it) :)
- Would be cool to follow up in a year or so with "where are they" - on the Web they grow (and blow!) so fast :)
Once again - very excited, this is so cool, and very grateful for all the votes.
Oh, another note - of 100 winners 3/4 were covered on Webware - pretty cool ration.
And also, I might "use" my students to carry out those ideas above - may be something cool for all to look at!
Igor
Well actually I believe no one voted for excellent and very fun to use with some very high web standards Glassgiant.com . It allows you to make pictures of already existing ones on your hard drive VERY EASILY that even little children can do it. You can make pictures from Dog Tags to Wanted posters to Breakfast Cereal Boxes to even Romance Novel Covers!
The second on is Miniclip NO DOUBT. It is THE BEST Website for games. It has a VERY nice community AND also has cartoons, and a nice ecard feature. No, it's not a site for little kids.It has the best UI for a games website BY FAR and loads of flash etc. It is NOT supported by ads. There are only a few flash banners for games and (sometimes)a nice banner to the dead popular FreeWebs. It has been around for some time and I have been around it for over 3 years. It just got better. Try Extreme Pamplona on the site, you won't be dissapointed.
Well actually I believe no one voted for excellent and very fun to use with some very high web standards Glassgiant.com . It allows you to make pictures of already existing ones on your hard drive VERY EASILY that even little children can do it. You can make pictures from Dog Tags to Wanted posters to Breakfast Cereal Boxes to even Romance Novel Covers!
The second on is Miniclip NO DOUBT. It is THE BEST Website for games. It has a VERY nice community AND also has cartoons, and a nice ecard feature. No, it's not a site for little kids.It has the best UI for a games website BY FAR and loads of flash etc. It is NOT supported by ads. There are only a few flash banners for games and (sometimes)a nice banner to the dead popular FreeWebs. It has been around for some time and I have been around it for over 3 years. It just got better. Try Extreme Pamplona on the site, you won't be dissapointed.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://c21skills.blogspot.com/2007/06/netvibes-trumps-pageflakes.html" target="_newWindow">http://c21skills.blogspot.com/2007/06/netvibes-trumps-pageflakes.html</a>
sounds like sour grapes??
**********************
Wow! That's amazing! Netvibes had its offshore team go to the voting site, clear their cookies, and revote, thus gaming the results. These "user" polls aren't worth crap. This is meaningless.
**********************
Rafe here from Webware.com. Regarding the "clear your cookies and vote again" gambit: It didn't work. While clearing cookies let you back into the voting interface so it *appeared* that you could vote again, we used other server-side methods to ignore duplicate votes from the same machine or user.
Webware (and Techcrunch, Valleywag and others) sometimes write about Germany being the country of copycats of American Web 2.0 ventures. But that is not the truth, Germany is also the country where even the publishing about Web 2.0 is.... just a copy what you wrote.
They (the FTD.de staff) didn't even put the US winners into local context, there are some local web 2.0 projects that had started before the US version came out... but maybe the had no time to do research, sitting all day long in a news room where print (daily newspaper), online, video text, mobile services and other stuff needs production.
I don´t read, like and need the financial times deutschland
(ftd). The use of the english title clearly shows the focus
of this daily newspaper: putting a strong focus on relvant issuses in america, taking the sources of the international financial times (and a few loacal news)and pesent it to the german speaking audience.
In this case a web event with nearly half a million voters of course is news, worth beeing reported - including the preesentation of top winner in each category. Thats what their article was about.
calling this copycat - is wrong and as I would say here in germany "off the trace" expecting that no one reads the cited german source.
Robert Weissmantel, Bremen, Germany
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