What's The Greatest Web Software Ever?

An anonymous reader writes "What's The Greatest Web Software Ever Written?, Charlie Babcock of InformationWeek asks, in his follow up to last year's widely read list of greatest software period. The winner then was BSD 4.3. The new Top 12 list is a little funky in that it doesn't distinguish between apps, sites, and controls — XMLHttpRequest object set — is one of the winners. It includes many of the usual suspects, like Digg and AIM, along with some unexpected winners. (like World of Warcraft) The number one choice however, Apache server, is arguably correct."

Ever ever?

[Zapotek]

Well, if you take "ever" literally... the greatest software ever hasn't been written yet.. :)

Is this guy a "real" journalist?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Or just another blogger? Besides the fact that it's nearly impossible to read his article, and the fact that it lumps dissimilar items together on a top-# list, his omissions make this a waste of time. Top "web software" and no NCSA Mosaic or Netscape Navigator (1.0)? Also, I thought the WELL was a BBS/Shell account provider?

Re:My List

[FooAtWFU]

Flash, I'll grant, begrudgingly (ack), but.... Flash *AND* Shockwave? And both of them on top of CSS? What are you smoking? Aside from the fact that it's not really a Piece of Software (and if it's there, why isn't HTML on your list, btw?)... as long as it's there, it ought to easily outrank both.

Pass the Macromedia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Adobe kool-aid, wouldya?

Anything with a spellchecker!

[gardyloo]

Oh, wait. Wrong place for THAT.

Re:My List

[Anonymous Coward]

3 - Netscape 1.0 - The idea of a GUI browser is fundamental to how we experience the web today.

So why Netscape 1.0? Why not either Mosaic (earlier) or Firefox (better)?

"Web" and "Internet" aren't the same thing

[ZorbaTHut]

The article's writer appears to have gotten this confused. As I'm sure everyone on this site knows, WoW isn't a Web application - it doesn't listen on port 80 and doesn't communicate with web browsers (barring a few status pages - you certainly can't play the game that way.) AOL Instant Messenger wasn't originally either. There are now web-based interfaces available, but he's not talking about those, he's talking about the original service which - again - didn't listen on port 80 and couldn't communicate with web browsers.

Amusingly, his screenshot of "Hotmail" runs into the exact same problem. He's apparently decided to take a screenshot of someone using Microsoft Outlook to log into Hotmail - not a web browser. While you can obviously use Hotmail with a web browser, and I suspect the majority of people do, that screenshot is particularly badly chosen.

Bad, bad writer.

Google Maps gets my vote

[SCHecklerX]

It's the most useful page I ever use. I can use it to plan bike trips, drives to friends houses or bars, bike races, etc. I also use it for looking up businesses in the area, and for phone number lookups. An example of 'web 2.0' being used as the best method to create the service.

Re:My List

[owlnation]

I'm with you apart from number 4 and 5.

Flash is, for my 2 cents, The Worst web app out there. It breaks usability - it's totally client side and screw the user. It's resource hogging and 98% of the time it's being used where it need never be - it's only the other 2% that's valid legitimate use.

Shockwave is much the same - although mercifully less used and abused than Flash.

Please understand that, in all seriousness, I value Flashblock / Firefox as the singular most valuable software combination currently available on Earth. I love those Flashblock guys, they gave me the web back.

Re:WoW was robbed

[omeomi]

What is WoW even doing on this list? In what way is WoW on the "web"? On the internet, yes, but I've yet to see somebody playing WoW on a web page of some sort. Do we really have to start calling every internet technology the "web"? Maybe this is explained in the article, but I'm tired of loading page after page of advertisements just to find out...

Digg, really?

[Rik Sweeney]

Personally I always found Digg to be *very* OK, nothing special, mainly shovelware stories. Perhaps it's because I discovered it around September 2006.

Unfortunately, after the whole HD-DVD key revolt, I decided Digg was just far too childish to bother with anymore. Sure, at one point Digg was probably very good, but after 1st May 2007, it died (for me anyway).

As with every piece of software, it'd be perfect if it wasn't for the users.

Routed

[Anonymous Coward]

routed is a implementation of RIP and no it does not run the Internet, peering between AS uses BGP (and while BGP and RIP are somewhat similar in its design routed does not speak BGP).
I would say that most major backbones are using either IS-IS or maybe OSPF. I know of at least one backbone
that runs IS-IS as its IGP.

routed (and RIP) might still live in smaller LIRs and in corporate networks, but it doesn't run 90% of the internet.

Synergy2

[stevemulligan]

I love this software more every day. http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] Control many comps with a single keyboard/mouse over your local lan. All they need is bidirectional support... Most of the software on that top ten list has annoyed me at one point in time. Synergy is the complete opposite.

Napster, Baby, Napster!

[theodp]

No Napster [archive.org] = No DSL/Cable, No YouTube, No ...

Google Spreadsheets

[Kohath]

Google Spreadsheets is the most technically impressive web app I've seen.

google.com?

[Plutonite]

The server side scripts and all related software running behind the google.com engine is probably the greatest package of web software ever put together, in terms of usefulness. My 2 cents.

Well, hello!

[nocynic]

What about SourceForge? I mean the concept is neat right? Write your own code, share it around get people involved. Most of the popular applications are available off sourceforge and are active till date!

Social Networking sites may be the talk of the town, but from a developers perspective (behind the scene) I would have to say SourceForge is one of the best things that happened!

Re:My List

[hobo sapiens]

I'd say Firefox, and <<insert extension>>.

The fact that Firefox 1) allows extensions and 2) has such an awesome community of extension developers, makes it the swiss army knife of the web.

Yes, software like Apache and IIS and PHP and MySQL help make the web. But Firefox allows it be browsed and developed.

Anyone can appreciate the browsing aspect by using Firefox with <<insert extension>>

But the angle I am coming from is from that of a web developer. Without Firebug and the Tidy HTML validator, it would take me twice as long to develop good code and debug it. At work I regularly call Firefox my #1 development tool. I could write all my HTML, PHP, ColdFusion, Javascript, PL/SQL in a Notepad and SQL*Plus if someone were to take jEdit and Oracle SQL Developer away from me. But without Firefox debugging javascript would be a total pain, validating markup would be a pain, and profiling xmlhttprequests would be a pain. Firefox does all of this for me while, you know, actually using my web pages. I'd choose Firefox over any extremely expensive development tool out there, at least for web dev.

Re:My List

[0xdeadbeef]

Flash revolutionized nothing. Flash is the antithesis of AJAX, not its progenitor. Otherwise you might as well credit Java, because far more serious browser-based applications were written with that technology.

Though I supposed they deserve credit for being so doggedly cross-platform and cross-browser. YouTube succeeded thanks to Flash, because they were not beholden to Microsoft or to Real or to Apple.

Re:PHP all the way.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is using Perl for the web anymore. It was a brief fad, and everyone has gotten over it. Well, apart from sites like Slashdot who are stuck with it now, of course. No one is doing new, large site deployments using Perl any more though.