Why people really love their web apps
By Lisa
09 March 2008 | Category: Web Apps
Last week at FOWA Miami we announced the results of our survey to find the web's favourite application.
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:
- Gmail
- Flickr
- Ravelry.com
- WordPress
- Mint (haveamint.com)
- last.fm
- Basecamp
- 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…
Follow @thinkvitamin on Twitter Please check out Treehouse
