Wired Top Five

Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 20, 2006 | Share This |

Today Wired published their Top 5 Web 2.0 Winners and Losers, based on a reader survey from the Monkeybites blog. The winners were a predictable set: Flickr, del.icio.us, Writely, Netvibes, and Odeo (evidently a lot of podcasters read Wired). I was suprised by the omission of Feedburner and Facebook (yes, Facebook. Despite recent negative press, 90% of their registered users return on a daily basis - talk about a service people can’t live without!), and would have considered YouTube, Digg, Wikipedia, and Blogger. AND hello? Craigslist? As far as losers go, the miserable bunch were: Myspace, Squidoo, Browzar, fo.rtuito.us, and Friendster. Totally agree with Squidoo - they’re the web 2.0 equivalent of that patchouli-scented candle that I got for my birthday. What the heck am i supposed to do with it? I suspect Myspace got added for the sake of sticking it to the Man, but I agree that they need a serious usability update. Poor Friendster, they started this whole social networking revolution and this is the thanks they get?

While there’s an endless list of crash and burn startups that could qualify for the ‘Losers’ list, there’s really only a few apps that consistently show up in the category of ‘Best” - most notably, Flickr and del.icio.us. Besides their uber webby names, what sets these two apart from the rest? On top of great usabilty, design, and simplicity of service, these two have done a stellar job of generating off-page visibilty. So, in the spirit of lists, and direct from the marketing campaigns of Flickr and Delicious, I present Web 2.0’s:

Top 5 Ways to be in the Top 5:

Start a New Categorization System that Becomes an Industry Standard

Like, um…. Tagging? Okay, so Flickr and del.icio.us didn’t invent tagging per se, but they are the undisputed industry leaders in tag organization. Tagging caught on because it’s such an intuitive way of sorting information on the net. Based on semantic categorization, tagging crosslinks metadata in a way that people can understand. Furthemore, it lets users assign multiple associative categories to single items, thus eliminating the “analysis-paralysis” of archving information into pre-defined categories. Both Flickr and del.ico.us use tagging as the basis of their entire systems of organization, which forces users to assign tags and strengthens the overall archive. The tag clouds generated by flickr and del.icio.us have been the subject of countless mashups, essays, and even a new branch of information science - Folksonomy.
Create Widgets for Everything

Flickr and del.icio.us have created widgets for your web browser, your homepage, your desktop, your blog, your website, other bookmarking sites, your search engine, and more. Any piece of content can be bookmarked in delicious, and every photo in flickr can be fed to another location. By encouraging third party sites to embed little bits of code, flickr and delicious have made their content findable. And while they’re not the only sites with widgets, they’re among the most widely recognized, thanks to early promotion.
Get Bought By Yahoo!

Is it any coincidence that both companies are in the Yahoo! network? Yahoo! may not be the leader in pure search, but they have demonstrated a solid understanding of how social networking improves web usability, and the impact it can have on search.
Get on the Cover of Newsweek

Really, any internationally-read magazine will do. Come up with a cute backstory, emphasize quitting your old job, be an underdog, insert hip words like “community”, cozy up to said magazine editor and smile!
Partner with the Supremely Cool

Screw major media advertising, the only press you need is hipster word-of-mouth. Make sure the early adopters of your product are among the supremely cool, and promote the heck out of your indie creed. Be a trend setter to the point that every 2nd web 2.0 company comes out with a variation on your name, and you’re just about guaranteed a slot in the top 5 every time.