Best Web Apps of 2005 – Where are they now?
Story byZee
Former CEO of The Next Web. A fan of startups, entrepreneurship, getting things done faster, penning the occasional blog post, taking photos(show all)Former CEO of The Next Web. A fan of startups, entrepreneurship, getting things done faster, penning the occasional blog post, taking photos, designing, listening to good music and making lurrrve.
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Category: Social Bookmarking
Best Offering:del.icio.us
Status:Alive and well.Obviously acquired by Yahoo, not the dominant social bookmarking tool it once was but going strong all the same.
Runners-Up:
Status:Alive – but dying.Site is still live, not sure how many users but by the state of the homepage it doesn’t look like much care is being given.
Status:Dead.
Status:Alive.Site seems to be going strong with a decent flurry of bookmarks – but much more competition today.
Category: Start Pages
Best Offering:Netvibes
Status:Alive. Going strong although immense competition from both igoogle and yahoo.In April 2008 the company announced they planned to open source their widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version.
Runners-Up:
Status:Alive, just.
Status:Alivebut Now Microsoft Live – hardly a success in the start page arena.
Category: Online To Do Lists
Best Offering:Voo2do
Status:Alive.One of many todo list app but nevertheless still alive and well.
Runners-Up:
Status:Alive.Still used by many as a basic todo list with iphone and online access – although much more now an integrated feature of other 37 signals products.
Status:Alive.Still a very popular todo list app with a premium version now available. Devoted users and ever expanding features – RTM shows how it’s done.
Category: Social News
Best Offering:digg
Status:Alive:Thriving and stories of expansion into global markets and niches seem to be true. This being so, Digg does seem to have a permanent home on the ‘for sale at the right price’ listings page.
Runners-Up:
Status:Alive– but sincerely doubt it’s used all that much any more. More of a ‘see if this works’ tool.
Status:Alivebut for all intensive purposes Dead. The site is up and stories are up to date (automated) however their most popular user isLenickwho has zero activity on their profile.
Status:Alive– bought by Conde Nast, recently went ‘open source’ and create your own reddits.
Category: Image Storing and Sharing
Best Offering:Flickr
Status:Alive.Sold to Yahoo and next to Facebook, the largest photo sharing site on the web.
Runners-Up:
Status:Dead. Site looks up and running, even quite new I would say but tried signing up and no luck whatsoever.
Status:Alive, although number of visitors to the site seem to have dropped dramatically of recent according to compete.com (US Only).
Status:Very much dead.
Category: Online File Storage
Status:Alive.Although it has never taken any funding the service still managed to stay alive and kicking.
Status:Alive, bought my AOL however if rumours are true, AOL recently tried to sell it to no avail.
Status:Dead, officially.A recent post by Clay Cook, one of OmniDrives main investors sheds light on some of the story:Nik CubrilovicOmnidrivelesson .
Status:Alive: with stiff competition this service is still managing to hold it’s own.
Category: Web-Based Word Processing
Best Offering:Writely
Status:Alive– Google Docs now.
Runners-Up:
Status:Alive– Less prominent then it was back in 2005, more of a feature integrated to other 37 signals products.
Status:Deadas a dodo.
Status:Alive:Flourishing with a range of other of web-office products.
Category: Online Calendars
Best Offering:CalendarHub
Status:Alive…just.Although there is very little mention of the service – it does seem to still be up and running. However their weblog seems to very much down so I doubt much work is actually been done on the app.
Runners-Up:
Status:Dead–The Massachusetts company was backed by Paul Graham’sYCombinator, but in the end just petered out and was put up for sale on ebay.
Category: Web-Based Project Management
Best Offering:BaseCamp
Status:Alive:Have taken funding from Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame and expanded into other other small business related products.Runners-Up:
Status:Alive:Recently took in $7 Million in Funding
