Falkayn's List of Web 2.0 Lists

For various reasons I've been exploring the Web 2.0 world more lately than previously. I have come across a few lists that I thought I would share, in case you're looking to learn more about this yourself.

For a start you must read Tim Ziegler's Webmonkey article Web 2.0: A Pattern Library for an easy to read breakdown of Web 2.0. It's only a summary of features/attitudes, it will be out of date within a year (at most), but it's pure gold if you are still fuzzy about what is Web 2.0.

Bob Stumpel's Sacred Cow Dung has the first list of Everything Web 2.0 that we'll look at. It's a nice list, posted in a blog post and limited to simple categorisations and bullet point format. Micro descriptions of each one help you decide whether to hit their link or not.

Now for a different sort of list (or two). ProgrammableWeb is looking to get you to their site with a short but sweet list of Web 2.0 APIs, and a more detailed list that covers Web 2.0 Mashups. They have a pretty decent Web 2.0 reference page that references sites talking about Web 2.0, common technologies used by Web 2.0 sites (including Amazon links for books so they can make a buck off it).

The eConsultant has an impressively plain (looks very Web 2.0 itself) Web 2.0 directory that both categorises sites and gives you an alphabetical view of them. Like any categorisation method it is limited by one person's view of things.

So we come around to the more interactive and truly Web 2.0 lists. First up is the eponymously named Web 2.0 List. There is no About page on this site, but basically it seems to be creating a ranked list of Web 2.0 sites based upon Alexa, del.icio.us and digg. Or perhaps it's just from Alexa, I included the other two because a) you could, and b) they show links to all three after every listing. The del.icio.us link lets you tag that site (rather than searching for it), but the digg link just lets you search for it. The Alexa link shows you their Alexa stats page. Confusing (an About page would sure help!), but interesting, especially when you include a tag cloud, give registered users the power to vote for sites, and show lists like top voted and top rated. A fun geeky site and worth it alone for the ability to get a tag cloud view of various memes at work.

Of course some of their data is a bit wrong, for example FCKeditor is listed as a Web 2.0 site. Well, it isn't, not by a long stretch of the imagination. It is a very nice Javascript-based text editor widget that can replace TEXTAREA fields in your online forms, but Web 2.0 it ain't.

So let's say we stay with human-editing, but want something a bit more Web 2.0 than we've seen so far. The Museum of Modern Betas may be just what the DJ ordered. It is basically in a blog format, with simple entries that show the name of the beta site (not necessarily Web 2.0, but nowadays almost always is), a thumbnail of a screenshot and the date posted. Clicking either the name or the thumbnail will take you to a more detailed page that shows a little bit of detail about the beta, usually a quote from the About page (the Web 2.0 List entry is decidely small) and often links to press about the beta. They've gone over 1,000 betas and seem to have their finger on what is happening at the moment. Cool features of MoMB are:

• a tag cloud


• an alphabetical list (good to see if you're there already)


• the top 100 as measured by number of del.icio.us links


• a list of alphas for the pre-beta crowd


• a list of ones that are by invitation only (the opposite might have been more useful)

Use all of them, use none of them, I don't really care. But I do hope this helps you get a few more hours of surfing Web 2.0 than you might have got on your own.

Feel free to comment on any I might have missed!

EDIT:
Saurier from MoMB kindly points out that Emily Chang's eHub is the most popular list around that I missed out (weird seeing as she's on the Web 2.0 Workgroup), and reminded me that Techcrunch have their own list of Companies and Products, which has the lovely feature of being available as an RSS feed (slurp!).