It’s out. A brand new list – Time Magazine list of the top 50 websites. See what’s hot – summary below.
1. Flickr – photo hosting website. There aren’t enough librarians in the world to look after Flickr’s archive of 3 billion photos, much less file them away for future reference.
2. California Coastline – A man, a helicopter and a digital camera: those three elements combine to create one of the most engrossing sites on the Web.
3. Delicious – Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) started out as a kind of Flickr for bookmarks (it’s no coincidence; Flickr and Delicious are both owned by Yahoo!) but is now more useful as a search-engine hack.
4. Metafilter – There are lots of collaborative voting and comment sites out there but there is only one worth joining, even if it does cost $5: Metafilter, or “MeFi” for those in the know. In fact, that fee ends up feeling like a feature rather than an impediment, because it manages to keep the site remarkably free of trolls, griefers and other anonymous jerks.
5. popurls – The hardest thing about getting news from the Net is keeping up with it. popurls (it rhymes with popular) cracked the code by pulling together up-to-the-moment headlines from the biggest and most popular news and opinion sites, blogs and vlogs onto one giant Web page for you to graze through. There’s nothing to remember to check or install. It’s the perfect homepage.
6. Twitter – the world’s largest microblogging website. Haters maintain that nothing worth saying can be said in 140 characters. Lovers quote Hemingway’s most famous short story in its entirety: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.”
7. Skype – For the average user, Skype is the best VoIP, even though it is a “walled garden,” meaning that in order to use the videophone feature, you have to convince your friend on the other end to join Skype too. Gmail users already have a videophone built into their e-mail app. Power users may want to check out Dim Dim.
8. Boing Boing – The four editors and writers behind Boing Boing will fiercely dispute this, but the site’s dirty secret is that it’s about as mainstream as it gets — for the mainstream of the Web, that is. If you want to understand what online culture is all about, stop by Boing Boing. When you find yourself anticipating the wacky and wonderful items the editors regularly churn up, you’ll know you’ve gone native.
9. Academic Earth – The latest campus revolutionaries are the so-called edupunks — and their mission is to break up the ivory tower so everyone can pile into the classroom. Academic Earth aggregates all this material so you can audit classes from the comfort of your computer.
10. OpenTable – OpenTable does one (seemingly trivial) thing: help you make a restaurant reservation. But it does it so well that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without the site. What kind of food would you like? When do you want to sit down? Here are your options; click to reserve. That’s it. Done.
11. Google - Google is search, e-mail, telephony and a full suite of Web-based G-ware (with a word processor, spreadsheet application, calendar and contacts manager). But wait — there’s more! Google sub-brands such as Blogger, Picasa and SketchUp could argue their way onto any best-of-the-Web list on their own merits. Depending on your point of view, the company’s many tentacles make Google the best thing since dancing babies or our future alien overlord. The choice between Microsoft and Google is a paranoid’s nightmare, but the rest of us can make the choice (or not) with Bingle, a clever mash-up.
12. YouTube – Another indispensable site owned by the Google borg, though the bulk of its content — cute cats, jiggling body parts and stupid human tricks — is plenty dispensable. But you never know what gems you’ll find buried under all those America’s Funniest Home Videos rejects. Also sit back and witness the world differently ThruYOU and In B Flat.
13. Wolfram|Alpha – A long, long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, Google was just two grad students at Stanford with a smart idea for search technology. Today’s search whiz kid is Stephen Wolfram, one of the biggest brains on the planet — and he’s got the new idea. Wolfram has developed a search engine that can actually understand your questions and try to figure out answers.
14. Hulu – Determined not to let what happened to the music industry happen to Hollywood, NBC and Fox teamed up to finance a site that gives Webizens what they want: free TV and movies, streamed in high quality, on demand. (Shrewdly, the networks have kept their logos, and their legacy issues, off the site.) Think of it as a TiVo subscription without the set-top box or monthly bill.
15. Vimeo - If you’d rather find Kanye West uploading his stuff — in high definition, no less — then search for the user name “kwest” on Vimeo. Lightly curated content and a reputation as the hangout for serious creative types keep the quality on Vimeo remarkably high.
16. Fora TV – Every day the site’s programmers upload clips of scientists, authors, intellectuals, captains of industry and world leaders standing up and laying out what they think they know.
17. Craiglook – Craigslist is on everyone’s short list for most useful website ever, but at this point, it’s embarrassingly retro. The Craigslist logo? A peace sign. The user interface? Text-based. The search function? A primitive command line. Craiglook remedies those things by adding all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles we’ve come to expect to Craig’s underlying listings data.
18. Shop Goodwill – On eBay you always find what you’re looking for, but so does everyone else — and that drives prices up. The solution is to fish in a less crowded pool, and one of the largest charities in the world, Goodwill Industries, has a little-known auction site filled with treasures.
19. Amazon – Amazon is a virtual store with infinite shelf space. Its sheer size makes it the default market maker for just about every product sold online, and thus it sets the prices to beat.
20. Kayak – Which travel site should you turn to when booking plane tickets: a) Travelocity, b) Expedia or c) Orbitz? The answer is d) All of the above — by using Kayak, a meta-search site for travelers.
21. Netflix – If you have a DVD player, odds are you already know about Netflix’s excellent movies-by-mail service. Netflix is morphing into a similarly excellent streaming-video service, but that’s no reason to forget the mailman’s name.
22. Etsy - Etsy is the long-haired, Birkenstocked love child of Amazon and eBay. It’s a crafts-only marketplace oozing with personality.
23. PropertyShark.com – PropertyShark.com is a free service that culls an incredible amount of data for houses in the big, coastal population centers, plus Texas. The PropertyShark database, searchable by address, tracks price history, comparables, tax-roll information, owner names, demographic information, flood and fire maps and more. A subscription buys even more information, including lists of foreclosure auctions and pre-foreclosure notices — even phone numbers of property owners. By the time you make that call, you may know more than he does.
24. Redfin - Disintermediation — another SAT word whizzing around the Web — means removing the middleman, and that’s the strategy of real estate site Redfin, which aims to do to Realtors what travel sites have done to travel agents: eradicate them.
25. Wikipedia – In 2005, the world’s most distinguished scientific journal, Nature, decided to compare Wikipedia and Britannica in a blind taste test. Nature’s conclusion? That Wikipedia and Britannica are roughly equal when it comes to accuracy. That finding is disputed by Britannica. Nature stands by its story. And Wikipedia, of course, documents Britannica’s beef with Nature in a mind-numbingly complete wiki entry.
26. Internet Archive – Ever wonder what TIME.com looked like way back in 1998? Or what eBay looked like on the day of its birth? Well, you can travel back in time and find out using Internet Archive. The site’s mission is to back up the Internet — the whole damn thing. Right now it has 3 petabytes of information in its servers (that’s 85 billion Web pages, or 10 quadrillion [10 to the power of 15] ones and zeros). That’s nowhere near a googol (10 to the power of 100), but it is the equivalent of 1.21 jiggawatts.
27. Kiva – Peer-to-peer micro-lending, anyone? Kiva links “micro-bankers” like you and me with screened “micro-preneurs” in the developing world (and now even in the U.S.). You can lend as little as $25 in capital to the Kiva applicant of your choice. When the money is paid back, you can withdraw your original investment, donate it to Kiva or lend it to another needy applicant.
28. ConsumerSearch – There’s no shortage of opinions on the Web — in fact, there’s a terrible surplus. ConsumerSearch does the best job of organizing and cataloging all those voices. It’s not a product-review site per se but a curated roundup of the most qualified reviewers — with a summary of the consensus opinion and links in case you want to dig deeper. It’s definitely worth stopping by before you make a purchase.
29. Metacritic – Heard an album or seen a movie recently that you loved so much that you couldn’t stop talking about it? Try looking it up on Metacritic and reading all its reviews, good and bad.
30. Pollster – Pollster aggregates data, but it has a Web interface that allows you to remix it on the fly. Is there a poll you don’t trust? Throw it out! Want a different smoothing algorithm? Change it! How much difference does it even make? Magnify the X and Y axes with a mouse-click and find out. Pollster supplies all the data that a budding Nate Silver could ever need.
31. Facebook – If you’ve been avoiding Facebook because you’re concerned about privacy issues or worried you’ll lose your life to social networking, you’ve already spent too much time thinking about this behemoth of a site. Although it’s desperate to be more, Facebook is really just a phone book. It’s where your acquaintances, friends, friends of friends and people you’ve met only a couple of times go when they need to find your e-mail address. While they’re looking at your page, they’ll be reminded of what you look like, your dog’s name and your hometown — the kind of stuff that makes small talk easier.
32. Pandora and Last.fm – Pandora and Last.fm are two near twin radio-killer applications. You seed the online players with your all-time favorite song — or whatever you’re in the mood to listen to — and a digital DJ creates a list of other songs you might like and starts streaming them through your speakers.
33. Musicovery – Musicovery is a music-streaming site with a mood-ring interface that works like a soundboard for adjusting your robot DJ’s musical taste.
34. Spotify – The holy grail of online music is what’s known as a “celestial jukebox”: an archive of every album in the world, there just for the listening. Think iTunes without the 99-cent song fee. The celestial jukebox is no pipe dream; it’s here now.
35. Supercook – Open your fridge and pantry, type the ingredients you have into the site’s search bar and stand back. Supercook will look through its database of 300,000-plus recipes and spit out the ones that match.
36. Yelp – Yelp has ballooned into the mother of all review sites, the place to go to get a sense of what people are saying about a restaurant, bar, boutique, mechanic or dentist.
37. Visuwords – Visuwords is a thesaurus reimagined as a toy. It asks you to think of a word and then turns that word into a universe of bouncing, rotating, vibrating meaning by pulling related words into orbit around it.
38. CouchSurfing – At the heart of its community is a social bargain: host a couch surfer as he or she backpacks through your country, and another couch surfer will host you.
39. BabyNameWizard.com’s NameVoyager – NameVoyager is for new mommies and daddies who are eager to give Junior a name to remember.
40. Mint – Mint is a free Web-based service that (with your permission) takes your information from banks, brokerages and credit-card companies and collates it into a single, easy-to-manipulate ledger.
41. TripIt – Most serious travelers carry a folder with printouts of their flight, car and restaurant reservations. With TripIt, you can simply forward all that information to plans@tripit.com, and the website’s “itinerator” does the rest.
42. Aardvark - Aardvark is a new kind of search engine that lets you ask friends and friends of friends a question — e.g., What websites should be on TIME.com’s “50 Best” list? — without spamming your entire e-mail list.
43. drop.io – The problem with working at home is that the files you need are inevitably on your work computer. You can e-mail yourself the necessary files or carry a USB drive back and forth, but drop.io is a more elegant solution: a private file-sharing service where you can stuff your stuff.
44. Issuu – Issuu is an online newsstand with infinite shelf space, hundreds of interesting micro-publishing projects and a slick online reader. Spending time browsing through the titles that are archived on the site comes so close to the feel of the actual thing that you might forget you’re in a magazine matrix.
45. Photosynth – Instead of arranging photos in a traditional album, the site finds relationships among pictures and digitally composites them to create an immersive 3-D photo environment called a “synth.”
46. OMGPOP – OMGPOP is like an arcade where you never run out of quarters or people to play with. It’s a highly addictive waste of time, even if the games are just copyright rip-offs of old faves.
47. WorldWideTelescope – Like Google Earth for the heavens, WWT aggregates terabytes of astronomical data from the world’s biggest telescopes to create a single virtual scope that anyone can look through.
48. Fonolo – “Press one for English.” Here’s a better idea: use Fonolo. It makes the call to that large, impersonal corporation, presses the right buttons and stays on hold for you until a human comes on the line. Then your phone rings and voilà, you can talk to a live person about your account.
49. Get High Now – Get High Now is a science site disguised as mind-expansion. There are 40 audio and visual illusions (or, if you must, “hallucinations”) to be experienced and, after reading about the brain science that explains them, understood.
50. Know Your Meme – Every other week or so, “researchers” from the thoroughly tongue-in-cheek Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies explain what’s funny on the Web and why — so you can be 1337 and have a life too.
See more at Time Magazine list of the top 50 websites.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great post full of useful tips! My site is fairly new and I am also having a hard time getting my readers to leave comments. Analytics shows they are coming to the site but I have a feeling “nobody wants to be first”.