Web 2.0: What Survived?

As an early adapter of web applications and operating systems from 2005 to today, I’ve seen a lot of innovation. The trends and tools we use in our online lives have empowered us to communicate and produce content like nothing else before it. The trend is slowing down now. It was a fun ride but for now, we can take a look at what tools have survived and which have become mainstream. The following is a list of applications I use on an almost daily basis and have earned their place.

Audio

iTunes store, Last.fm

Email

Gmail, Xobni

Chat

Instant Messenger: Trillian Astra

Voice: Skype

Other: Twitter

RSS

Feed Demon, Newsgator

Social Bookmarking

Delicious

Web Browser

Firefox (with Greasemonkey extension)

Storage

Carbonite, Amazon Web Services

Sync

DropBox, Box.net

Location-based

Google Earth, FireEagle

Photo

Flickr, SmugMug

Video

YouTube, Hulu

Productivity

Basecamp, Google Docs

Search/Reference

Yahoo search, Wikipedia

Social

Facebook, LinkedIn

Publishing tools

WordPress, Tumblr

My overall winner would be GMail because there are so many different ways to extend it’s use in other applications, storage capacity and continuing innovation. This deserves a blog post of it’s own. Hmmm.

So what is next? What will we see with web 3.0? Can you imagine some of the up and coming apps we’ll use in the near future? A merger of web applications in desktop functionality? Mobile web?

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