Sites that revolutionized the Web

I compiled a list of the websites that have changed the way information is produced, handled, or distributed over the Internet. Many of these sites have something in common: they enable users (human or software) to judge the relevance of their content, to provide "interesting" information to others. This has been called distributed cognition or collective intelligence: like diligent ants, the small contributions of many people or sites lead to great achievements and sources of information.
  • Google. The most effective search engine for several years now. It judges the relevance of a webpage (its PageRank) by the PageRank of webpages that link to it. Thus, if many webpages link to a certain site, this should be interesting. And even more if those webpages are interesting themselves. Google has become an empire of free web-based utilities (in some cases buying other companies):
    • GMail. One of the most flexible free web-based mail providers, it gives users almost 3Gb of disk space and decent spam filtering. A great tool for keeping and searching old mails.
    • Docs & Spreadsheets. Edit and share online documents and spreadsheets. Great for collaborative work. Import and export to/from OpenOffice, Word/Excel, HTML, etc... (Used to be Writely, which Google bought...)
    • Blogger. Well, the host of this blog and millions of others. There are a lot of blog providers, so I will not attempt a list. The benefit of blogs is that they enable the easy and quick production of information by anyone with Internet access. Certainly, lots of junk is produced every second (like this blog...), but out of that interesting things can be sifted... For example, the US Pentagon filters all information about Irak that is published or broadcasted on usual media. But they don't have control over the Web, so blogs became a powerful weapon against Bush's government attempt to hide information on US soldiers killed, prisoners tortured, etc.
    • Books. Search on books.
    • Scholar. Search on academic texts.
    • and much more...
  • Wikipedia. The world's largest encyclopedia. Wiki enables users to easily build web documents collaboratively. This led to the development by an enthusiast community of this free encyclopedia. Everybody can edit documents (which are of course monitored for accuracy), so its growth rate is immense compared to any other published by a much smaller group of experts. In less than five years, it has more than million and a half entries in English. Because it has articles in more than 250, from Esperanto to Nahuatl, from Swahili to Maori. The Wikimeadia Foundation has several sister projects, among others:
  • Amazon. Buy online! Largest bookshop in the world. Useful features include ratings and reviews of products by users, and automatic suggestion of similar products (people interested in what you bought, also bought...).
  • eBay. Auction online! Users also rate sellers, so it is easier to trust somebody who has given excellent service to others. And it motivates sellers to give a good service, since they will be rated by their clients.
  • Orkut, Friendster, hi5, etc... Social networking sites. Also useful to make new friends with desired characteristics. LinkedIn is similar, but business-oriented.
  • del.icio.us. Make, share, tag, and search bookmarks online. "Social bookmarking".
  • YouTube. Users can upload and rate videos. Recently bought by Google, which already had its own Google Video.
  • Flickr.com. Store, share, search, and rate photos online.
  • Sourceforge. Host of thousands of open source projects. Useful for collective development of software projects, since it provides free website, CVS, etc.
  • arxiv. The first of several open archives, scientists can share their preprints before having to wait the long process of journal publication. Even online journals can take several months to review a paper. Best place to find out the most recent research, and the best way to divulge quickly your own.
  • CiteULike. Make, search, share, and tag academic citations online.
  • Digg. People vote on news items. News with most votes are shown in front pages, so you tend to get interesting news (for a certain category). Nowadays most news are tech-related, but the model has lots of potential. A similar site is Google news, only that the relevance of news is calculated automatically.
  • Pandora. Free online radio, suggesting music similar to an artist or song of your choice. See this post.
If you have more sites to add to this list, please post a comment!

Comments

Unknown said…
Nice list!
You forgot to mention Skype.
Cheers,
Clément.
6:10 AM
Carlos said…
Clément:
Agreed, but Skype is an application, not a website... maybe I should make a list of "applications that revolutionized the Web"... e.g. Firefox, Napster, BitTorrent, mIRC, Picassa, etc...
8:49 AM
By Anthony Liekens said…
With respect to revolutionary music services, and radio becoming "Radio 2.0" via "Web 2.0," I prefer Last.fm over Pandora. Last.fm uses social networking to recommend new music, by finding users that have similar musical preferences based on the statistics of tracks they have played.
9:27 AM
Carlos said…
Anthony:
Thanks for the last.fm tip, didn't know about it... Started playing with it. Indeed, last.fm is more community-oriented, since recommendations are made by other users, while in Pandora they are indirectly made by experts, but also by usage. Both have advantages and disadvantages: From what I saw, last.fm will recommend very popular songs, since it's what is played most, while Pandora can surprise you with more unknown music (but maybe I need to use last.fm more to get better suggestions).

Definetly last.fm has better software, as you can download a standalone player, and will take into account the music you play in Winamp or iTunes for your profile. However, we need to give it to Pandora that they started the Music Genome Project in 2000, while last.fm started 2-3 years later...
4:55 AM
Hector Zenil said…
I would say that probably craig's list. But mainly in the US. Weird that there is no a global craig's list, but perhaps by definition it would be impossible. Anyway the idea and the local success is like any of the other mentioned sites.

Hector Z
7:08 AM
Hector Zenil said…
What about yousendit.com?
and probably I would give Yahoo a place since it was the first search engine and as popular as Google.
What about myspace.com, I do not like it very much but usually it is placed in such kind of lists within the most influential websites.

H.Z.
7:33 AM
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