What is the coolest Web 2.0 site out there?

Tell me about your favorite and the most promising web2.0 site out there.


Why do you think they will become successful?

What is the coolest Web 2.0 site out there?
Given the phrasing of your question, I assume the "they" you are referring to is the people who have built my most favorite site. But, to be safe, I will answer the question in a creative way: I am going to list a variety of web 2.0 sites and tell you what they do and why each will be successful. I am also going to focus upon relatively new web 2.0 sites, as you will have heard of the less new ones. I hope you don't mind.





Web 2.0 Winners, in order of least favorite to most favorite:





14. LifeIO (http://lifeio.com/) – The coolest calendar, photos, contacts, sharing, application I have seen in a long time. It is a webified mash-up of the essential stuff you need to manage your life. Very well designed. Well executed.





Reason they will win: the integration of these tools inside a socially aware web app is truly unique. They will get snapped up by Yahoo! Or AOL within the next six months. I predict Yahoo! Since LifeIO’s CEO is an ex-Yahoo! Exec.





13. Sharpcast (http://www.sharpcast.com/) – These guys synchronize all your content and apps across your mobile, desktop, laptop, Windows or Mac machines. The cool thing is how you can use files across devices, just they way people actually work.





Reason they will win: They are solveing a real problem. They will be able to sell their solution for a price that users will tolerate and make pleanty of money off of the millions of people who will buy it.





12. Vpod.tv (http://blog.vpod.tv/) – YouTube is great, but they lack really great online video editing capabilities. These folks have nailed that one. They also have a really great sharing and monetization model.





Reason they will win: They will struggle to position against YouTube, Google Video, etc., but like LifeIO, they are on the fast track to be bought, probably by AOL, or someone like that.





11. Webaroo (http://www.webaroo.com/) – Search the web when you are not connected. This product is based upon figuring out the web’s 80/20 rule of which sites are the most probably relevant sites and making them available in a web search engine that is available offline.





Reason they will win: Again. They solve a real world problem in a cleaver way. I would expect Ask.com or some second-tier search player to make a move to buy them before they get too big.





10. ZiXXo (http://zixxo.com/cmn/Homepage.aspx) – Merchants can create online coupons that can be redeamed by users in the physical shopping realm for a fraction of the price that I would cost them to produce the same coupons and distribute them via newspaper or direct mail. These coupons could even be made available in the context of web sites or blogs, etc.





Reason they will win: They are so drastically reducing the cost of coupons, and making them available to consumers so conveniently, the money drivers will cause it to succeed, as they apply from a variety of angles: from the advertiser, to the person wanting to save on products. It will just work well, and then make their money off of service fees for millions of coupons printed by people wanting to save money.





9. Ether.com (http://www.ether.com/) – Lets you earn money selling what you say. Think of this as a place you can offer your over-the-phone advice and get paid for it. I can think of a bunch of uses for this. One of the funnier ones is driving directions. Call me up from your cell phone and for $0.50 I, or one of my pool of answerers, will give you directions from your current location to whereever you are trying to go. Or, I am a family counsellor, and I get calls all the time from clients off hours. This way I can charge them a small fee for talking through their crisis with them.





Reason they will win: People have been monetizing products on the web for a long time. Now, they can sell their services. It is a natural and logical next step, and they have made it super easy to set up.





8. SoonR (http://www.soonr.com/web/front/home.jsp) – Turns you PC into an personal connectivity server. My favorite thing about it is the skype support, which illustrates the technology model, from any cell phone, I can place a call using my PC’s instance of Skype and conference me into any SkypeOut number I want to call. So now I get free long distance on my cell phone… Bye Bye overage charges!





Reason they will win: Market size and awareness of pain will combine to make this compelling product a must have. They will continue to leverage their core IP to integrate with more and more services that are web-based.





7. Vaestro (http://vaestro.com/index.php) – Allows people to establish and participate in forums by recorded messages (voice comments), related to any topic they choose.





Reason they will win: Matt Ready has created a tool that is easy to use. He will benefit from the amazing attention to user-gnerated content, including that which can be generated as a response to podcasts, or vidcasts. Voice is a much more compelling medium than text for communicating certain kinds of information.





6. Simpy (http://www.simpy.com/) – This tool is great because it incorporates users browser bookmarks as social tags. Then it also lets users continue to bookmark online. By combining their existing bookmarks, they feel really comfortable with adding new bookmarks online, where those bookmarks can benefit all other simpy users.





Reason they will win: People love search and discovery, they love their bookmarks, and will love how Simpy adds the benefit of all user bookmarks in retrieving their search results.





5. Findory (http://findory.com/) – A blog search engine that will let you create dynamic RSS feeds that will give you results of new blog content that matches a set of search terms.





Reason they will win: Blogs are hot. This is a hot blog search engine. If they can get their ad model to work, they will win big, even with Google Blog Search out there, especially for their RSS feed support.





4. Jookster (http://www.jookster.com/) – Social searching tool. Allows you to receive search results based upon what others in Jookster’s user base have found to be interesting. You can tell how credible the results are based upon the number of degrees of separation between you and the recommender you are.





Reason they will win: Better search, especially for communities of interest. They, too, will have to get their adSense like ad model worked out, but if they can, they will attract millioins of users.





3. StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) – This is one of the coolest web site discovery tools I have ever seen. You put in your interests and the system helps you discover web sites you would probebly never have found on your own.





Reason they will win: People trust the recommendations of friends more than they trust any other source, when it comes to advice. The approach taken here, and with Jookster, allows a person to discover what other people like them have found useful. That is compelling. Now, they will have to outrun Google and Yahoo!, but given their unique approach, they have less to worry about in that regard than others. They, too, will be an acquisition target, but I struggle with exactly who I envision for a suiter.





2. Plum (http://plum.com/) – Plum lets you really easily aggregate (pack rat) web sites you have visited, making them fully searchable, and also enabling social interaction around the content of the sites.





Reason they will win: People are packrats, and they love to share and show their collections of stuff with others. They also like to find the content they have previously seen, especially for the use case where one has read somehting, found it mildly interesting, and then had someone ask a question that brings it more to life, and they then want to tretrieve it instantly, mail off a link, etc.





1. NetVibes (http://www.netvibes.com/) – I think you should make this your new home page! Like Google’s new custom home page feature, but far more exciting from an extensibility perspective. Meaning, they guys have a great start on delivering on a vision of a time when any web 2.0 API based app can be simply incorporated into a user’s portal page. That means these guys could be a sort of application foundation for building integrated web appilcations that fit into a portal-like, user definable interface.





Reason they will win: A more seamless integration of the many disparate web 2.0 applications will become increasingly important. This product will act as a platform upon which the user can assemble all his favorite web 2.0 tools into a single experience, without the help of a programmer.








So that is the list!


Just for grins, here are some more established web 2.0 sites:


- Technorati


- Digg


- del.icio.us


- PRWeb


- Flickr


- 37signals (basecamp, campfire, tada lists, backpack, writeboards)


- jotspot, especially their wiki stuff (amazed at the breadth of their offering, now that they have been out for a while)


- Google: - writely - Google Spreadsheets - Google alerts


- Yahoo - Flickr - Yahoo news - Yahoo Podcast Search


- PodZinger (podcast and vidcast search engine)


... and the list goes on...





Hope that helps!