Web Apps with Class

It would be interesting to talk about web applications and services in terms of the year they “graduated” and went public to the world. IMDB was ’90; Amazon.com was ’95; Movable Type was ’01; WordPress.org and Typepad were Class of ’03; Gmail was ’04; WordPress.com, Akismet, Youtube, TechCrunch, and pbwiki were ’05; bbPress, Amazon S3, and Twitter were ’06; Pownce was ’07, etc. It’d also be cool to see a timeline of major web apps.

19 thoughts on “Web Apps with Class

  1. Nice idea for yet another blog. 🙂

    Each service can have a post of its own. Publishing date of the post can be the date that the service went public. A custom theme optimized for archives could present a nice looking timeline…

  2. Termination dates would also be interesting. What major apps were there that are no longer around, or have faded away and are no longer to be seen unless you go just for nostalgia or use the WayBackMachine of archive.org

  3. God you’re nihilistic. Of all of those sites you operate, I’d say none of them are in the same class as those other sites.

  4. Omidyar started eBay in ’95 … does that count as an app?

    Or how about Ward and “wiki”? “I have located some early mail that indicates wiki went public in 3/95.” Or Real … “That led RealNetworks, Inc. to invent and release the RealPlayer and RealAudio in 1995. (Does anybody here recall ReadSlideshow? I like it … a lot.)

    @Robert – MIT’s SIMILE|Timeline … hard to beat.

  5. I love the idea!
    It would be cool to have a dynamic graphically represented presentation of all such web service and we could even show them with respect to their popularity!

    I think that would be cool and being able to update it with new apps coming up would be cool, what say??

  6. In my opinion, bbpress deserves am extra mentioning, as well as PurposeGames.

    I utilize them both for different purposes. bbpress for my forums (three and counting) and PurposeGames for school stuff. I think that both of these apps deserves a bigger crowd though. bbpress especially seems at a standstill.

    I guess akismet gets an implicit mentioning now since the beauty of bbpress comes, in part, from its utilization of akismet.

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