Top 5 Web Applications of 2004 | December 22, 2004

With new web applications like Flickr and Del.icio.us debuting this year, along with the redesign of old favourites such as Blogger, 2004 seems to have been the year of the web application.

Here are my top five web applications of 2004. What are yours?

Posted at December 22, 2004 8:50 AM

Comments

Martin said on December 22, 2004 10:36 AM

Gmail - definately
Gravitar - Just wobbled but its back!
Textpattern - Simply excellent!

John Oxton said on December 22, 2004 10:59 AM

Yup, what he said!

I use my gmail account heavily and it is just brilliant, especially the sorting of emails in conversational threads… life saver!

Rob McMichael said on December 22, 2004 11:40 AM

I think gmail is great just for the fact it boosted everyones views on storage space. Places like hotmail, yahoo, web servers and free hosting no longer offer users 2mb of space :)

I’m going to check out your browser tester thing, sounds good

Kev said on December 22, 2004 11:43 AM

Firefox 1.0 and all the extensions I use, especially the Lorum Ipsum generator and Web Dev toolbar.

Still not got GMail as I’m paranoid about the security aspects of it so my vote goes for the excellent Yahoo Mail (I also really like their latest redesign).

WordPress and all the lovely hacking you can do with it.

Gravatars because its a nifty idea that needs support.

Can’t think of a fifth :o(

Kev said on December 22, 2004 11:45 AM

Oh yeah, I know FF isn’t strictly a web app but well the extensions sort of are and you need FF to use the extensions.

Drew said on December 22, 2004 11:53 AM

Basecamp has to be on my list. Without a doubt.

Textpattern would certainly be on there too.

However, I’m not sure that the Google Suggest interface qualifies as an app in its own right. It’s more a innovative feature of one of the greatest web apps of all time - Google.

Olly said on December 22, 2004 12:23 PM

Wordpress, Basecamp, Gravatar, SPG 1.1, Google.

Holger Dieterich said on December 22, 2004 12:51 PM

b2evolution is on my list. It’s an excellent PHP/MySql/XHTML weblog software, open source with multiblog/multiuser-support.

Zelnox said on December 22, 2004 2:21 PM

I use gmail daily and del.icio.us often. I’d use Flickr if I had a camera, haha. I just started to try out 43things. Pretty cool. And yeah, gravatar does look interesting.

Jeff Hardy said on December 22, 2004 3:20 PM

Here are my Top 5 nominees (in order):

Building on the idea that the interface is the software, all of the above web applications have redefined the the typical interface with great success. I think we’ll see more and more of truly well-designed, user-centric interfaces in 2005.

Jeff Croft said on December 22, 2004 3:30 PM

Gmail, Flickr, del.iciou.us, Basecamp, and The New Blogger top my list.

Jeff Croft said on December 22, 2004 3:46 PM

Oh, just thought of another, but I’m not sure if it came out in 2004 or not: Bloglines. I use it everyday — not sure how I forgot it.

Mike D. said on December 22, 2004 5:03 PM

Great list! … but I’d trade all five of those for Bloglines any day of the week and twice on Sundays!

Bloglines rules.

Randy said on December 22, 2004 5:33 PM

How can you forget Basecamp?

Remi P. said on December 22, 2004 7:29 PM

In 2004, WordPress became the easiest blogging engine available, in my humble opinion. Not as complete as MT, but less complex. I also love the idea behind Gravatar

Nick Rigby said on December 23, 2004 9:05 AM

In no particular order: Gmail, Thunderbird, Firefox, TextPattern

Bart Grzyb said on December 23, 2004 1:20 PM

Here’s my list:
  1. GMail
  2. WordPress
  3. del.icio.us
  4. stock.xchng
  5. RSS feeds

nathan holman said on December 24, 2004 8:56 PM

flickr
basecamp
wordpress
firefox and all the extras
and flickr again.