9 March 2008
Why people really love their web apps
Last week at FOWA Miami we announced the results of our survey to find the web’s favourite application.
We were amazed to receive over 3,000 votes in just a few weeks, and it showed that people are certainly passionate about their apps.
While the results didn’t throw up any major surprises (although there are a couple of exceptions), they did confirm a few trends that we certainly have noticed about web app adoption.
Here are the results again:
- Gmail
- Flickr
- Ravelry.com
- WordPress
- Mint (haveamint.com)
- last.fm
- Basecamp
- Livejournal
It’s clear that the apps that people really are passionate about are the ones that help them to communicate and share their experiences with others. Thus we have Gmail, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter right up there. These were overwhelmingly the favourites in our poll. Livejournals also fits this pattern (though we were surprised to see it in the top ten).
Apps which enable people to create and curate their online experience, plus which have social or communicative elements are also important. Again Flickr falls into this category, but there’s also WordPress and Last.fm.
Shaun Inman’s Mint is a hugely well-respected and well-used app in the web community, so we weren’t surprised to see that in the top ten either.
So when it comes to web apps, yes utility is important – you need to somehow make people’s lives better – but we just can’t help falling in love with apps that help us communicate better. The irony is of course, that more and more people are communicating online than off, but that’s another blog post…
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Tamlyn
# March 10, 2008 - 10:23 am
Ravelry? “A knit and crochet community”? I’ve heard that knitting’s enjoying a comeback but, I mean, in the top 10?!
Warren
# March 10, 2008 - 2:00 pm
And what about Ravelry.com?
Something tells me the poll has been a little bit hijacked.
Always a danger in any poll online now, because genuinely its unexpected but can you categorically say its wrong?
Is their a possible indicator that could be used to ‘even’ things up a bit
Like take the number of votes and multiply it by number of users or somthing / or devide by alexa score (needs a bit of thought)
I think its interesting but ultimately i just wonder about its accuracy.
Any change of releasing the next 20-30 results? ( i think they would be far far more interesting)
Ellen
# March 10, 2008 - 7:25 pm
Ravelry’s awesome! And it’s a huge community since it was opened less than a year ago (and is still in beta with 90,000+ users)…
Douglas Neiner
# March 10, 2008 - 11:23 pm
I find it interesting that Basecamp and Mint (haveamint.com) are in the 10 ten, yet they are pay services (Basecamp has a free option as well as their pay plans). The free services overwhelm the list, but these two apps are SO good, that the paying community has voted them into the top 10. I think that speaks volumes to the people behind these two companies.
This poll was awesome and very interesting to look at! Thank you Carsonified!
Kei
# March 14, 2008 - 1:32 am
Just curious, how were the surveys distributed? Through your website? I’m curious to know about demographics of the survey pool. Like Tamlyn and Warren, Ravelry.com – a hot knitting community? :0 still speechless
Top 10 web applications - success of UGC « jca’s Com blog-notes
# March 16, 2008 - 3:59 pm
[...] mars 16, 2008 · Classé sous Com · Tagged top 10, UGC, user generated content, web application ranking Through a poll launched on the web by a small British company (carsonified), 3000 web users voted for their preferred web application. Results were released in March 2008 and they are quite interesting in a perspective of user generated content (see previous post about it or another one in French) : [...]
Miles Galliford
# March 20, 2008 - 5:27 pm
I thought that this list of applications would be useful. These are the web apps we have used to build our company from 2 to 10 people over the last couple of years. They have helped keep our start up costs down and contributed a lot towards the company’s success.
Below is a summary of the most important apps. Full list here.
Communications
Skype (www.skype.com) – chat amongst employees, with suppliers and for customer support
Gmail – (www.gmail.com) – most convenient webmail because it links into so many other free Google apps
Pidgin – (www.pidgin.com) – aggreagte messaging clients
Jajah – (www.jajah.com) – cheap landline calls
Images and Image Editing
SnagIt – (www.snagit.com) – Great software solution for grabbing screen shots
FotoFlexer (www.fotoflexer.com) – My preferred service for online editing
iStockPhoto (www.istockphoto.com) – cheap stock images
Flickr (www.flickr.com) – image backup and sharing
Multimedia
Camstudio (www.camstudio.com) free screencast video editing solution. Adequate.
Camtasia – (www.camtasiastudio.com) – fully featured (but reasonably expensive) screencast software, but worth the money if you are ceating a lot of tutorials.
Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) – open source audio editing software. Not as good as Garage Band, but does a good job
Networking
Facebook – (www.facebook.com) The business favorite
LinkedIn – (www.linkedin.com) Excellent for reaching potential partners, clients and employees
Plaxo – (www.plaxo.com) the best solution for keeping contact details up to date
Back Up
Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) – I always pay for back up because it is so important for a business. Carbonite is simple and cheap
SyncBackSE – (www.2brightsparks.com/SyncBackSE) – god solution for local back up
Company Organisation
Google Sites (www.google.com/sites) – exciting new service from Google that enables you to store and share documents. Like having a company intranet
Google Calendar (www.google.com/calendar) – all our team have use
Google Calendar so its easy to find people and coordinate diaries
Google Docs (www.google.com/docs) Not the best office applications, but it is integrated into the other Google services so we tolerate its shortcomings
OpenOffice – (www.openoffice.org) All our team now use OpenOffice. It is now a genuine free substitute for Microsoft Office
FreshBooks (www.freshbooks.com) an online invoice tracking solution.
Web Stats
Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) – the best analytics solution out there
Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) – We use alerts to monitor what people are saying about us and our competitors
Customer Relationship Management
SugarCRM (www.sugarcrm.com) the open source version is a bit clunky, but once setup works well
Kayako – (www.kayako.com) a very good help desk management tool which tracks support tickets. Invaluable!
GoToMeeting – (www.gotomeeting.com) we do all our demos and training online via GoToMeeting.
So that’s my opening salvo!
If you have other tools that are free or cheap that you regularly use, please share them. I will ceate a master list and post it on the forum.