'Most Valuable Sites' for the Web 2.0 era

Web 2.0 has been around for more than two years now. Around June of 2006, two Israeli programmers got together to create a website in their sparetime that will carry the logos of all the new and upcoming web 2.0 sites. It has hardly been half a year since, yet the website now carries more than 833 logos. That in itself explains the proliferation in the number of websites that have been propping up in the post-dotcom bust period. Google has emerged as one of the, if not the most coveted website from the previous century. Now, with such a huge number of websites that have come up in the short time that web 2.0 has come to be, it makes sense to read these new websites that have come up and guesstimate which among these will be the 'newsmakers' amongst this new bunch. Looking from another perspective, we need to see why only one or two of these websites should actually become a 'newsmaker'. It does not take much time to reason out that sites that can actually find a solution to the existing chaos will emerge the winner eventually. That was the very same reason why Google became hot property at the turn of the century.The new medium of web was churning out so many websites that it became virtually impossible to look for one particular data from the millions of pages. Google solved that very problem. Problem of web 2.0 Similar to what we saw for Google, if only we can find the problem that we might face with this huge onslaught of websites, picking the most valuable website among the new lot should not be a difficult task. Now, here is the situation: 833 websites that's been on Go2Web20 alone. That makes the actual number of websites much higher than this. Now, zeroing on the website shall not be a difficult task, thanks to Google. But managing them can be. Imagine this: I love reading, making friends, surfing news, watching TV, etc. Now, there is a website for me to do each of this. For instance, there is Shelfari for the avid reader, Digg for the news buff, MySpace for networking, and YouTube for videos. Now, the more the number of sites, the number of places I frequent increase too. Here comes the problem: I not only have to remember all these numerous sites, but also have to remember my login information for all these websites. Having one login for all the website might not be sensible for some, and del.icio.us might in itself get cluttered when you try to bookmark websites and individual pages alike. For that very reason, I thought it would be really important for us to know why the following two websites shall be considered the most valuable ones in the long term. NetVibes NetVibes is a website that lets you add all your bookmarked websites on one platform. So, in other words, if you visit Digg, orkut, youtube, flickr and a dozen other sites, you can add link to all of them here. This apart, you may also add RSS feeds, perform image, and blog searches, check mail; basically do everything that you visit the internet for. This is not the only place you may do this. Even Google offers its own personalized home page feature, but as with any website, NetVibes has this function as its USP and that should help it in the long run in branding. There is one very critical aspect that could be to NetVibes financial favors. Since the very purpose of NetVibes is to serve as a platform for you to jump to another website, it naturally serves to be the default webpage for most users on their browsers. The enormous number of visits that this shall generate makes it one of the most prolific earners on the internet. OpenID This is a not-for-profit website that is aimed at achieving a mission of 'One User Id for all'. Though this is in the initial stages, once OpenID is made available for all major websites, unique login ids for every website may become a thing of the past. Interestingly, though I feel that this is one of the most valuable websites in the coming days, it does not feature in the 833 sites listed, probably because it does not strictly fall into the category of Web 2.0 Like you see, these two websites, when combined offer you a strength that is most desperately needed in the age of web 2.0 when dozen sites prop up every other day. Though these websites might not achieve the greatness that Google achieved in its time, from a user point of view, a combo of these two sites is the best thing to ask for.