Five Web Apps that Deserved More Attention in 2008
Even though 2008 isn’t exactly ending on a high note, we have definitely seen our fair share of interesting new web apps and online services this year. Some of those, however, never quite caught on, even though they are really interesting and cool. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why these things happen – could be because of the day they launched (or even the time of day they launched); could be that people didn’t quite get the purpose of the app (yep – lots of bad marketing around); or maybe I’m just an idiot for liking these services…
Here are the five services that I though deserved a bit more attention in 2008 (in no particular order):
Pixelpipe
I wrote about these guys on RWW in August. Pixelpipe is basically ping.fm for media files. It lets you forward your pictures, videos, and audio files to lots of different social media sites and photo or video sharing services like FriendFeed, Flickr, brightkite, kyte, bebo, Twitter, or Facebook. This week, they also announced a cool new mobile site and I use their iPhone app almost daily.
Blogrize
Blogrize is a mix of Digg, Techmeme, and ReadBurner. It’s mission is to create a community of readers around blogs but giving them a place to share and vote on everybody’s shared RSS feeds. Every blog gets its own community and hence the recommended items tend to be very focused, as readers tend to self-select. It’s still a small site (and was gone for a good part of the year), but it’s off to a good re-launch this month (and they just started importing FriendFeed ‘likes’).hopefully we will see more of it next year.
Mufin for iTunes
Mufin’s website and web app is crap – no way around it. But its iTunes plugin (Windows only) that uses Mufin’s algorithms to categorize your music collection based purely on the sound and rhythm of the song – not on what other people liked. It’s become a constant companion for us while listening to music and in many ways, it’s better than Apple’s own Genius feature, as it simply scans and analyzes your songs without any regard for how the files are tagged or whether they are available in Apple’s library. Great way to discover music you didn’t even know you had.
Feedly
Feedly is set as my homepage and is the first thing I see every morning. It’s a magazine style RSS reader that draws from your Google Reader subscriptions. It’s a Firefox plugin with a lot of cool social features, but even though it started out with a lot of hype earlier this year, we haven’t heard much about it lately, which is really a shame. Feedly’s roadmap for 2009 looks great however and we hope a few of you will check it out.
Mento
In many ways, Mento is the PixelPipe of social bookmarking services. It allows you to easily send your bookmarks to sites like FriendFeed or other bookmarking services like Delicious. Mento is also a great bookmarking service in its own right (especially because it allows you to clip images from the sites you are bookmarking) and it has some cool social features. Even if you already use Delicious, Mento is a good alternative, as it still saves your bookmarks to Delicious as well.
A few more:
For good measure, here are a few other companies that we hope will have a breakout year in 2009: OtherInbox (still in private beta, but it’s changed the way I give out my email to sign up for services), Browzmi (social web surfing and cool use of XMPP – surprisingly fun and really well put together), and Qitera (just launched, but is a cool bookmarking service).
Who did we miss?
Surely we have missed out on a few services in this list. If you have your own overlooked favorites, let us know in the comments.