Webware 100 winners announced!

We just announced the winners of the 2009 Webware 100. Nearly 630,000 votes were cast during the voting this year to pick the best Web 2.0 sites and services. As with the previous years' awards, there were some surprises among the expected winners.

As in previous years, Google got the most awards--this year 11 in all. And also as in previous years, the social network Gaia Online got a disproportionately large number of votes, as did the big-in-China browser, Maxthon. Justin.TV joined Maxthon and Gaia Online in the list of Webware 100 winners whose huge number of votes outstripped their sites' influence among typical Webware 100 readers.

Surprises included a few products that did not make the final list of winners. Google's Blogger didn't make the cut, for example. In fact, Google had no winners in the hotly-contested "Social & Publishing" category at all; this category got more votes, 185,000, more than any other.

Digg also didn't place in the winners' lineup this year, nor did it last year. Although a "dugg" ballot for a contest like the Webware 100 can generate a big spike in votes, our traffic charts show that these spikes don't lead to the the sustained traffic necessary to drive enough votes to win in a category.

Readers last year suggested that Webware 100 include not just products that win the popular vote, but also products chosen by the editors of Webware as the best available. We didn't want to second-guess the wisdom of our crowd, but we did nonetheless create an 11th category, Editors' Choice. In this category, you'll find some of the smaller and less-popular products in awards subcategories we created just for them, like Technical Achievment, Best Newcomer, and Best Twitter Rip-off. There's also a booby prize in our Editors' Choice: Failure to Launch. It's a tie.

See the previous years' winners: 2008 | 2007

Read more about the Webware 100.

Acknowledgment: Thanks, PollDaddy, for Webware 100 polling technology.