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My Favourite Web Apps of 2007

Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Web

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It’s the end of another year, and so time for "best of" and prediction posts, which are a lot of fun to write.

In no particular order, but loosely categorised, my favourite apps of 2007 were:

RSS Reader: Google Reader
I used to be Bloglines’ biggest fan. I still love what they’re doing, but Google Reader has been my favourite RSS Reader throughout 2007, thanks to their continued innovation and experimentation. But the great thing about this space is that innovation is back: Google forced Bloglines’ hand, but the Bloglines Beta is encouraging. Newsgator has never really stopped innovating and it’s only the fact that I prefer a browser-based Reader that’s prevented me from becoming a Newsgator fanatic.
One new RSS Reader to watch is fav.or.it, which is doing some innovative work including integrating comments.
Start Page: Netvibes
I use Netvibes because its a fine product, well-designed and always ahead of the curve in comparison with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo’s similar offerings.
Tech News: Techmeme, Original Signal
Techmeme is well known amongst tech bloggers and readers, quite simply because it’s second to none in keeping up with tech news. Aggregating news on a single page, ordering it and having it constantly catching scoops as they happen — it’s very hard to pull that off. Many have tried, but none have become daily addictions like Techmeme has for me.
Original Signal is another that I use a lot. It is a useful aggregation service of popular links, in a variety of categories. It’s a very simple idea, but nicely implemented (with previews, ability to re-order, etc).
Online Music: last.fm
Without a doubt the best online music service. I frequently use last.fm during the working week, and it never fails to throw up great new artists that I’d not heard before.
Pandora is also fine, but unfortunately it’s inaccessible to me as I live outside the US.
Web Email: Gmail
I’ve spoken many times about how I love the ‘web native’ functionality of Gmail. It has performance issues at times (even going down for half a day early in the year), but overall it remains my number 1 email account.
Yahoo Mail is still the number 1 worldwide, and Windows Live Hotmail has millions of users too. I also tried Thunderbird during the year. But none was able to even come close to enticing me to ditch Gmail.