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>> Hi, I'm Rafe Needleman, Editor of Webware.com and I'm happy to announce the winners of the 2008 Webware 100 Awards. These are the 100 top Web apps, ten each in ten categories according to you. Webware readers and Web users voted 1.9 million times to select these 100 products from a list of 300 finalists, which was selected by Webware editors from a list of 5,000 qualifying nominees. Yes, that's right. We went through all 5,000 of those Websites, so you don't have to. You can see the entire list of the 100 Winners right now at webware.com slash 100. And if you're at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Thursday, April 24, join us in celebrating the winners at the Booth Crawl Event at 4:30 PM.
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>> As with the 2007 Awards, the majority of votes were cast for winning products, and just more than half of all the votes went to the top 10 winners in the program. Now some of these 10 winners will be no surprise. Facebook, Firefox, Google, iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, but some of the other winners may not be as familiar to you. For example DeviantArt, the Arts Community, or Friendster, a social network that was big, it became small and maybe making a resurgence. And then there's Gaia Online, a social networking site for teenagers and a big winner in last year's Webware 100. Finally, Maxthon, a browser that's huge in China if not so much here in the US. While we kept the editorial influence out of the Webware 100 voting, now that the results are in, I can pick my favorites out of the 100 winners. My criteria are simple: Useful, interesting fun or some killer combination. So these are five of my own Webware 100 top picks.
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>> First, Picasa Web Albums. This is a pale shadow of Flickr in terms of buzz and community, but solid integration with Google's desktop photo app Picasa makes it a great place to publish photos designed for limited distribution, like your friends and family. Then Twitter. Now the people who laugh at Twitter do not understand it. There's much more going on in Twitter than knowing what kind of sandwiches your buddies are about to eat. Check it out if you're not on it already. Next, RememberTheMilk. This handles the simple job of keeping your to-do list, but it does it better than other similar apps, while at the same time offering a ridiculous number of features to improve the experience. It's a great Web 2.0 application. Then FotoFlexer. One of a group of online photo editors like Picnik, which was not a winner that is redefining what you can do on the Web. And finally, OpenID. The single signon standard continues to gain momentum. The OpenID concepts are still a little foreign for most consumers to get, but sites supporting OpenID keep making it simpler. This could easily become the Web-wide universal login within the next two years. So, that's it for the 2008 Webware 100 Awards. Big congratulations to the winners. To get an early look at the products most likely to be winner of the 2009 Awards, be sure to check out Webware.com -- often. Seriously, Bookmark it right now. And for the full line-up of winners, this year go to Webware.com slash 100. I'm Rafe Needleman for Webware.
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