Coolest Web Apps of 2005

Now is a great time of year for best of lists. As we reflect over the last year and look towards next, one can’t help but wonder what cool things are around the corner. 2005 was a great year for innovation on the internet. With the semantic web coming to fruition and all of the brilliant minded web developers out there, we have sure seen some incredible things this year. While some of the top players in this list were in existance before 2005, all of them certainly reached their pinnacle over the last year. So here it is:

1. Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking app that helps users discover the best sites on the web while also providing a great mechanism for tracking one’s personal bookmarks. Recently, Yahoo! acquired Del.icio.us and despite the hard time I’ve been giving Del.icio.us lately, they still kick major ass in my book.

2. Pandora, also known as the music genome project is a great application for discovering new music. Instead of ranking a song based on popularity, Pandora suggests songs based on many properties of the song such as beat, rhythm, instrumentation, and many many other criteria. With Pandora, I’m always listening to great music!

3. tech.memeorandum crawls the web in search of the stories that are recieving the most buzz. It then lists articles based on their popularity. I find tech.memeorandum one of the best ways to stay on top of breaking news in tech.

4. Technorati is a great blog search engine. With over 23 million blogs indexed in real time technorati is a great up to the minute source for what is cool in the blogosphere.

5. Google Earth is a 3D browser of planet earth with remarkable resolution and slick interface for navigating the earth. If only they’d make it for the Mac!

6. Flickr is a great social tagging application for photos. Its easy to find just about any type of photo using flickr. Its also a great way to share photos. Yahoo! also acquired Flickr this year.

7. Bloglines is a great RSS feed reader and blog management tool. Syndication has reached the public domain in 2005 and is a great way for people to ingest information in a quick, highly efficient way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 at 9:03 pm and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.