The Original Web 2.0 Companies

The Four Horsemen of Web 2.0

These four companies known for amazing innovation best demonstrate the essence of Web 2.0. Instead of suffering the fate of the other Dot Coms, they thrived through the downturn by leveraging the principles of Web 2.0. Their success is so widely known that it is now taken for granted, while their databases of customer information have become a growing privacy concern.

Google
Google provides many characteristic Web 2.0 services: Blogger, Adsense, Maps, Search, Base, Gmail, GTalk, Reader, Statistics. Each of these services either exploit the read/write Web or the Web as Platform.

Yahoo
Nearly all of the services that Yahoo provides leverage Web 2.0 principles: Mail, Music Downloads, Movie Recommendations, Shopping, Maps, Local.

Yahoo recently acquired both Flickr and Del.icio.us.

Amazon
Amazon's Affiliates program, Reviews, People Who Bought This Also Bought..., and wish list sharing were early and influential Web 2.0 services. Their new Mechanical Turk service is another Web 2.0 gem.

eBay
eBay provides many buyer and seller services that aim for greater participation. Their API is one of the most successful, and the network effects they enjoy from their large user base are unrivaled.

New Exemplars of Web 2.0

New companies and services embracing the principles of Web 2.0.

These companies are by no means an exhaustive list, but are leading the pack. They provide popular software and services that have proved their worth among the competition.

Flickr
Flickr is a fast-growing photosharing service that provides an collaborative user interface as well as a powerful API to it's content. (Recently acquired by Yahoo!)

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a popular social bookmarking service. Joshua Schacter, the founder, characterizes his service as a way to remember things. (Recently acquired by Yahoo!)

JotSpot
Jotspot provides several services: Jotspot - the Application Wiki, which allows users to create and share wiki-like web pages. JotLive - a live group note-taking application.

37Signals
37Signals provides several services: Basecamp - a project collaboration tool and Backpack - a collaborative tool to create sharable web pages.

Digg
Digg is a content aggregation service. It provides a mechanism for its many users to "digg" a piece of content, and aggregates them like votes to bubble up the most popular content to its widely-viewed pages. In this way Digg culls the actions of its users to provide value.

Writely
Writely is a web-based service that allows for the creation and sharing of documents in a sophisticated word-processor-like interface.

Feedburner
Feedburner is an RSS publishing service. Sites can direct their readers to a feed at Feedburner instead of hosting it themselves, taking advantage of Feedburner's advanced tracking capabilities to provide insight into who is reading your feed.