We were amazed to receive over 3,000 votes in just a few weeks, and it showed that people are certainly passionate about their apps.

While the results didn’t throw up any major surprises (although there are a couple of exceptions), they did confirm a few trends that we certainly have noticed about web app adoption.

Here are the results again:

1. Gmail
2. Flickr
3. Twitter
4. Facebook
5. Ravelry.com
6. WordPress
7. Mint (haveamint.com)
8. last.fm
9. Basecamp
10. Livejournal

It’s clear that the apps that people really are passionate about are the ones that help them to communicate and share their experiences with others. Thus we have Gmail, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter right up there. These were overwhelmingly the favourites in our poll. Livejournals also fits this pattern (though we were surprised to see it in the top ten).

Apps which enable people to create and curate their online experience, plus which have social or communicative elements are also important. Again Flickr falls into this category, but there’s also WordPress and Last.fm.

Shaun Inman’s Mint is a hugely well-respected and well-used app in the web community, so we weren’t surprised to see that in the top ten either.

So when it comes to web apps, yes utility is important – you need to somehow make people’s lives better – but we just can’t help falling in love with apps that help us communicate better. The irony is of course, that more and more people are communicating online than off, but that’s another blog post…

We turned to the web to see if it had the answer – but try typing in ‘popular web apps’, ‘successful web apps’, ‘most used web apps’, and the picture you get is far from conclusive.
So with that in mind, we decided to do some research of our own, and behold, the first Web App Charts

Our aim is to get a definitive idea of the most popular web apps out there – as used by real people. Please visit the site and vote for the single most wonderful web app that you use and couldn’t live without – it could be the most useful, the most brilliantly designed, the best value for money. And when you’re done, please mention it wherever you can so we can get as many votes as possible. One voter will be selected at random to win a shiny new Nintendo Wii!

The results will be announced at our next event, the Future of Web Apps Miami, 28 April – 1 March 2008.

Last Thursday the Carsonified team got together to choose the lucky recipients of our individual Hugs. We had decided to give our Hugs away to those who demonstrated that their machine needed one the most, so we set up a Wufoo form for people to choose their desired Hug and in a sentence, make their plea.

We had no idea if anyone would even want one of our little pocket creations, so after getting in a well-deserved round at the local pub, we sat down to discuss our newly gained sewing skills and in between sips, used our iPhones to hit ‘refresh’ every few minutes on the Wufoo report. We couldn’t believe it – every time there were 5, 10, 15 more requests – in all, we received 249 pitches to win a Hug in just a handful of days, and over 11,000 visits to the Hugmymac.com site – wow!

Elliot’s Framed and Mel’s Oggie series proved far and away the most popular; in fact we did briefly think about launching into full-scale production, but while the quality of our Hugs is not to be knocked, having fingertips with more holes than a swiss cheese is not really our thing.

Before we wrap up our Hug story for now, here are just some of the highlights from the entries we received – thanks everyone for making us smile :)

“Because I have very sweaty fingers. And bad breath. Plus poor spelling and a terrible cold. Oh jebus help me!”

“Because once, a long time ago, my Macbook was held captive in an unspeakable place filled with many horrors. I was required to pay ransom for her. When she was finally brought to me, she had been wrapped in a foam blanket, and forced to lay quietly in a box! They banged her around, shipped her across the ocean, forced her into the back of a truck, and then drove her across the country. She is so distraught now from this journey that she has spoken only a few words since she arrived, and even then the tone of the words sounded tinny, like there was no emotion behind them.”

“My Macbook really needs a hug because it has been abused severely in my travels in the United States Navy. Currently it is serving with me aboard the USS Essex, and is underway with me 8 months out of the year (every year). It goes with me when I go out into different countries when we pull into port, and it is used by me almost daily as I work on different projects onboard. It’s actually been needing a hug for a while now, but I haven’t had the time to find another Macbook lover to give it one. (Actually, it’s really hard for it to get a hug because the PDA rules onboard are quite strict.) P.S. Spam me all you want, your hugs are hella cool!”

“It’s pretty simple. This is all about the geek and hip factor. What’s geek? Being meta. What’s meta? If I get Elliot’s Framed Macbook Hug, I’ll have the OK/Cancel character using it in a comic. It’ll be a webcomic about design with a character holding a Mac Hug drawn by a designer. Whoa. (Mind Implodes)”

“Because it rains so much out here in Seattle, and it’s c-c-c-cold. My poor iPhone is shivering right now…my whole pocket is shaking. Please help, it REALLY needs some warming up!”

“My iPhone needs this hug because it is a rugged road worrier. My iPhone follows me on every adventure I go on. With my iPhone I will conquer world. That’s why my iPhone deserves a hug. If you don’t agree with what I just said, my iPhone will own you. I don’t know when, but it will… And if you dont believe that it will then I will use my iPhone to call Chuck Norris and he will deliver a deadly round house kick in the name of my iPhone. He will do this because my iPhone is the only item or person to ever survive a deadly round house kick.”

“Because I’m callous, superficial and scandalously two dimensional and this may be my one last chance at redemption – a chance to give my mac the love it deserves and forever turn me to the path of hope and righteousness. At only 3 weeks old it’s had a a dent put in it by the power pack landing on it’s shiny bonce; coffee spilt on it; chocolate eaten in bed, in the dark, stuck to it’s keyboard and a plethora of cuts and bruises from living in a bag that’s far too small. As Darth Vader once said, “for you a hug shows kindness, strength and compassion – for me it is merely an excuse to rub myself up against someone I fancy”

“Mel Kirk, you’re a designer extraordinaire
I’ve seen MacBook sleeves of silk, diamonds, and mohair
But fine felt as exquisite as this I wouldn’t dare
To pass by without a jealous “I must have it” stare.
So please, dear Ms. Kirk, hear my plea
Even my computer is begging in ASCII
Honour us both with the beauty of Senior Oggie
And we will forever be thankful to thee.”

“Jo… I’m going to make this simple: send me your hug or else I’m posting the photos of … [censored]… Love, Jeff”

Talking at 3pm will be Google’s Dave Burke – he’ll be covering Android and Google’s role in the Open Handset Alliance. It’s the most highly anticipated session of the day, and is being live blogged by Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK.

For anyone planning on attending next year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, the event’s Panel Picker is now live!

We’ve submitted the following proposals:

• Getting Things Done Are you being crushed under a sea of unopened e-mail? Do you start one project only to be distracted by another? This panel will bring you tricks and tips from the masters, a look behind the scenes at the workflow of top studios, and inspire you to streamline your daily chores. Are you ready to become a GTD ninja?
• Fire your freelancer, now! Following on from the controversial post here on Carsonified, this panel will ask, as freelancers become more expensive and offshore employees become more of a real proposition, should you be thinking about firing your freelancer and out-sourcing your projects? We’ll talk to some people who have gone down the off-shore route and those who haven’t to find out where the future lies.
• Pedantic Semantics: Using Subtlety to Fight Lazy Web Design As designers, it’s in our nature to agonise over the details – perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But this level of perfectionism should be celebrated and embraced, especially when it comes to applying that ethos to our markup. Care about semantics! Care about code indentation! Care about class names! Only through perfectionism can we convert the non-believers who are content to mark up sites like MySpace.
• How to sell a web app The goal of many web app developers is to sell it or to be acquired but how does this happen? What are buyers looking for? What should you avoid when trying to sell? What should you actively promote? All this answered and more.

If you like the sound of these panels, please vote!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/2/q:carson

• Using demographics for online marketing
• The most effective online ads
• Secrets to successful blog advertising
• The future of search marketing
• The ad potential of crowd generated media
• Ads in video – which format will work
• Increasing the ROI in search advertising
• Advertising in the virtual world
• Lots more!

Speakers included Yahoo!’s Ron Belanger, Google’s Kim Malone, Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove), Jay Adelson (digg/Revision3), Heather Luttrell (IndieClick), Darren Rowse (ProBlogger), Brent Hill (FeedBurner), Joel Greenberg (Electric Sheep) – it’s all good information and you can get it for free from the Future of Online Advertising website!

Unfortunately we didn’t make it to Web 2.0 Expo, which looked like an tremendous event (in the truest sense, there were thousands of attendees!). We were hosting our own event in London, called the Future of Web Design. This was an interesting one for us – the web conference calendar is loaded with events all vying for similar attendees, with FOWD we tried to mix up the various factions in the ‘web design’ industry and bring together some of the web standards crowd with more traditional agencies and individuals.

Was it successful? Definitely – overall reaction to the event has been immensely rewarding. People got that FOWD was about creativity, techniques and ideas in all aspects of the industry. But this wasn’t the view shared by some – they wanted more on the ‘future of web design’, or their idea of ‘web design’ didn’t tally with someone else’s. We had expected that, and in truth it was one of the reasons for putting the event on – to break down some walls and get these various factions together to find out what unifies us all.

We’ve learnt a lot from the event, both by speaking to people on the day and reading the various blogs and comments that soon ensued, and already have a huge to-do list of things to improve on for next year. It can be crushing to read negative comments about something you’ve spent months working on. Feedback is the lifeblood of any successful venture, but surrendering yourself completely to the comments, blogs and twitterings of the web is, for the uninitiated, a daunting prospect. Which is why I was interested to read about one session at Web 2.0 Expo on The Social Media Revolution: You Oughta Be in Pictures (and Podcasting, and Vlogging) at Web 2.0 Expo that attempted to explain how web 2.0 traits (you know, social networks, tagging, blogging, that kind of thing) can help your business. I like these kinds of sessions – sometimes we get so wrapped up in technology that we often forget about its practical application.

One of the takeaways was that businesses can use these tools to stay on top of how their customers feel about their products. As event organisers, content publishers and web app developers, we’re acutely aware of the power of the web for both promoting, trouble-shooting and developing our products.

It’s not uncommon to find me keeping a watchful eye on Twitter, Technorati and Google Blogsearch whilst one of our events is going on to find out how people are responding to the presentations and the organisation. In some cases we can even make adjustments while the event is live. The same goes for our web applications, and of course Vitamin, which really is just one big user-generated exercise: comments and clicks soon tell us what people like or don’t like.

But despite the obvious benefits to this real time R&D and customer feedback, it’s crucially important to know when to tune out*. There is a time to not listen to customers, or the blogosphere at large, to turn off comments, and to keep things private. Why? Control. And vision. And goals. We host events for upwards of 800 people at a time. We crave their feedback, and regularly call for it, but if we acted on every negative post and comment, we would soon end up losing what we originally set out to do, and where it fits into the larger plan.

We love being so close to our customers that we are in constant dialogue with them, but you have to bear in mind that people are more likely to make a noise if they’re unhappy than if they’re satisfied (it’s fact of business life). It’s incredibly easy for someone to let you know that you’re crap – a few taps of the fingers, and there it is. If they had to phone you up, or write a letter, and justify their reasoning, would they be able to substantiate their argument?

You cannot be all things to all people – not unless you have a very simple-featured product that does one thing and does it supremely well. If you’re scaling a product, there will be people for whom it doesn’t deliver on what they expect. You can work around this (and this is what we’ve learnt for our events) – you need to be crystal clear in the way you communicate, make it blindingly obvious who you are and what you do. You need to manage people’s expecations from the outset – whether it’s the copy on your site, or what you say to someone on the phone.
When it comes to feedback, the skill is to keep your channels open, make yourself approachable and stay connected, but align the negative comments and recommendations with things you already know or suspect to be not working and let them help shape your critical path, not dictate it.

*Brian Oberkirch is taking an almost hermitic approach, editing down his varied connections with the web at large to focus on the task in hand and to operate on his time, rather than global web time (GWT) – you know, the zone where you’re always online, always responding to people’s mails, IMs, looking at their pictures…
Regular readers of Carsonified will know about our 4-day week. Another recent thing we’ve done in order to battle the daily deluge is to simply set our emails to manually send and receive at certain points in the day so we’re structuring our own working day, rather than slavishly following the edicts of the inbox.