Ampers & Dot

Mashable, the authority on social networking news, just announced the Open Web Awards winners, honoring the year’s best in social networking (which, as far as I can tell, were made up by Mashable). The cool thing about the Open Web Awards is its “open”ness: anyone can be nominated and anyone can win. In the end though, all the results are pretty much as expected…

The main thing I want to talk about here are all the various winners that I enjoy to pass along some fun sites for those who spend less time online than I do (which is about 17 hours?) (And for the record, my analysis is mainly covering the “Judge’s Choice” section, not reader’s choice- but I like the way they slipped in a little web 2.0 social networking of their own by letting readers comment and vote…)

Winners I Enjoy

“Social News and Social Bookmarking”: Digg
If you ever need to waste two or three hours, go to digg. Although I could never really get into the “social” side of digg, commenting and discussing links with people, Digg is everything I enjoyed about my old favorite link-aggregate site, Linkswarm, but about 100 times more extensive.
Word of warning: Digg is soon to be purchased (upwards of $300M?) so I’d suggest not getting too attached. Once it goes corporate its user base will flee (likely to Mixx), leaving it empty and worthless (insert Britney Spears joke here).

“Mainstream and Large Social Network”: Facebook
Have you heard of it? It goes without saying that 2007 was Facebook’s year. It owned the news and I’m really only listing it here to discuss its ridiculous scale (I’ll come back to this later). There are around 70M people on Facebook now… that’s just crazy.

“Places and Events”: Meetup
If you live in a city large enough to maintain an active Meetup directory then go check it out. This site does a fantastic job of branching the digital and physical worlds, without being creepy or awkward.

“Social Shopping“: Woot
You read that right, Social Shopping is a thing… Plus I think it’s great that the word of the year is also a cool website with amazing deals on random items. Seriously: random. The way it works is that they only sell one item at a time (at some crazy discount) and as soon as one item sells out, they list a new one. You should bookmark Woot and check back regularly

“Start Pages”: iGoogle
Now, I know this was a reader’s pick, but iGoogle just does a better job than Netvibes in my opinion. It’s a customizable widget station for your google search page… I’ve seen some pretty cool setups before- but I have: Weather, Email, Digg Updates, and my Google Reader feed. Everything I’d ever need in one place… just wonderful.

And on to other miscellaneous comments: I think the concept behind the Reader’s Choice winner for “Video Sharing” - Kaltura. During a discussion at lunch today I actually argued that YouTube has lost its focus, making it too hard to find relevant videos. I mean, sure it’s great once someone links to something, or you want to browse similar videos to something you’ve already found- but searching for keywords makes it almost impossible to find what you’re actually looking for. Ironic, seeing as how it’s owned by Google… What I’m saying here is that I think there’s a huge market for sites like Kaltura- which are YouTube, with a more finite purpose. I expect we’ll see a few more of these popping up in 2008.

Flickr won the best picture sharing for judge’s choice… How the heck did it not win reader’s choice? This makes no sense to me. It’s a community of hundreds of thousands of active bloggers and such… my only guess is that they did absolutely zero promotion, compared to vois, who likely promoted the hell out of this contest.

And Google Mobile won Reader’s Choice for Best Mobile Site… could someone explain this to me? I must not know what Google Mobile is.
Well that’s it for me today. I’m heading off to GA tomorrow morning so there’s a pretty good chance I won’t be posting until later next week, about which: I’m sorry. But hopefully you won’t be checking this over the next few days anyway… should you need me- text or email is the best bet.

So Happy Christmas to all the readers out there- hope everyone gets some good time off and enjoys a break.

Oh, and I’ve already decided to can the idea of the QOTP - if you want to post, you will. No need to force web 2.0iness.

Cheers!