Favorite Web Apps

I got involved in a conversation the other day about favorite web apps. Here’s my Top Five:

• IMDB - Wikipedia is starting to contend with IMDB as the first place I go to look up information on movies, but IMDB holds a special place in my heart. I’ll never forget discovering it about ten years ago. That was the first time I was certain that the web was going to totally change how we organize and access information. The complete freedom to follow the highly interconnected relationships between movies, actors, and directors was thrilling. Before then, the web was a faster and more convenient way to get at information that could be had via other channels. Tremendously useful, for sure, but not quite revolutionary. There may be examples that pre-date it, but IMDB was the site that really brought it home for me.
• Wikipedia - Opinions seem to range from WIkipedia being more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica to it being so inaccurate as to be a joke. But for my money, it is the best thing created since the web itself. Paul Graham put it better than I could: “Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part of the conversation.”
• Gmail - Not so much because of its AJAX implementation, although that’s very cool, but because of how Google re-thought the user interface of a mail reader. For example, moving entire threads back into the Inbox when someone replies to an archived message. And, of course, the ability to rapidly search all messages with a single keystroke is invaluable. Not only is it highly effective in discovering what I’m looking for, but it has freed me from my compulsion to create large hierarchies of mail folders. Filing messages in these folders consumes a lot of time and energy and often makes finding messages more difficult rather than easier.
• Google Maps - I love maps, and I’m not aware of a better site for easily navigating maps and satellite imagery. Google Earth/Maps* is one of my favorite ways to waste time.
• RSS - Sort of an application framework as opposed to a specific application, of course, but transformative however you categorize it. As Netvibes puts it, RSS lets you “remix” the web.

The key to most of these examples (and the web itself) is having a simple but effective model (e.g. information feeds, encyclopedia topics, email messages), defining an accessible set of operators on that model (e.g. publication/subscription/aggregation, create/edit/diff/rollback, labeling/archiving), and then removing as many restrictions from users’ ability to exploit the operators as possible.

* Update (2007-09-13): Make that Google Earth/Maps/Sky/Moon! **

** Update (2007-09-19): I missed Google Mars. I think Google’s producing map applications faster than I can keep track of them.