Top Web 2.0 Companies and Ideas

Walking around Berlin with a friend, we hit upon discussing “What were the most important outcomes of Web 2.0?” In other words, now that Web 2.0 is officially dead, who were the real world-changers that came out of it? By comparison, the world-changers of “Web 1.0” seem to have been Google (taught the world to search), Amazon & eBay (taught the world to buy online), eBay (taught the world to auction, and to sell its junk)

#1 Wikipedia – The hype around it has died town, but only because we all take it for granted now. It has become the standard go-to reference for the planet. We probably don’t understand yet how much this will change our society. At first I argued that Facebook had been the most important, but my friend argued convincingly that Wikipedia has changed the lives of more people and more fundamentally changed human life. It is interesting that Wikis in general have not had the same impact. (See my other thoughts on Wikipedia as the storehouse of objective knowledge.)

#2 Facebook – It rolled up all the other innovations in one neat and tidy package. Most importantly social networking (as from Friendster and then MySpace), photo sharing (as from Flickr), and “the feed” (not sure who originated this, though it certainly existed in other places before.) Traveling overseas, I am amazed at the how many foreign conversations I now here which are littered with distinct utterances of “facebook”. It was said that countries tied together by trade were less likely to go to war. I suspect this is even more true of countries tied together with social networks. (My thoughts on Facebook over the years.)

#3 Blogger / WordPress / Blogs in General – It is now taken as given that anyone in the world can express themselves for free on the internet. Blogging was what brought this belief to the mainstream, and how we settled on the standards for this format. We take all of this for granted now, but we should remember that 10 years ago people were still debating of what order posts should go on a page, how comments should work, and experimenting with unholy hybrids like “blikis” (blog+wiki).

#4 Craigslist – Arguably the most important factor in the decline of newspapers in the US. Craigslist has revolutionized the way we sell and buy. The entire world of physical things is now far more liquid. It has mostly taken over from eBay as the place for personal commerce.

#5 Twitter – Though still without a business model, Twitter is certainly on to something. It came later in the Web 2.0 game than the others, and is an extension of the blogging paradigm. Perhaps it will be like Google, which came relatively late in the Web 1.0 game also.

Who else would you put on this list?