Webware

AllPeers, one of the 30 Webware 100 finalists in the Search & Reference category, is dead.

According to the company blog, the peer-to-peer file transfer service never got the user growth it needed to keep its investors happy. We covered the service a few times and gave it mixed reviews. I always thought it was an important product, but not a great one. It was a Webware 100 winner in 2007 and we made it a Webware 100 finalist again for 2008. However, early returns on AllPeers are not promising for this year: It has less than 1 percent of the vote in its category. (Part of that was our fault: It was somewhat misplaced in the Search group.)

We are removing AllPeers from the 2008 Webware 100, and this leaves us with 29 products in the Search & Reference category. We could leave it at that, but having only 29 products in this category offends my sense of order and symmetry, so I want to add another product to the polls while there's still time for it to make a fair showing in the voting. I could pick a product from our database of nominees, but I think I'll open this up to users instead. So, in the Search & Reference category, which product do you think should be added to the list of finalists? If the product you like is already a finalist (see list), please don't enter it here--vote for it instead.

I'm going to leave this write-in campaign up for just 24 hours--I will close it at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, March 4. So if you feel there's a Search product missing from the Webware 100, now's the time to make yourself heard. I want to be clear that this is not the vote. While I will strongly consider the number of nominees a write-in gets, ultimately I will pick what I feel is the most important product to be added to the polls. And once I do that, it will have to earn real votes like all the other finalists.

Update: The poll is closed. Based on the submissions (many of which were not for actual Search & Reference products), I picked Retrevo to replace AllPeers in the Search & Reference category. It will be added to the polling engine shortly.