Итоги-2007: Лучшие интернет-приложения

While everyone is trying to create their ultimate list of the winners and losers of 2007, please allow us to take a different, utterly subjective route, and choose the coolest web applications of 2007. Yes, we’re not looking for that geek with straight A’s in the front row here; we’re looking for the guy in the back who has the brains to be the best but he just doesn’t give a damn. Only applications that became available to the public in 2007 are considered, so excuse us if we haven’t covered all possible categories. Here are our winners in this weird category, in no particular order.

Mixaloo - Perhaps in the future mix tapes will be nothing but a forgotten relic, their very concept devoured by the internet and its easy access to everything. But right now, mix tapes are retro in an undeniably cool way, and Mixaloo comes as near to the concept of a mix tape as possible. You can create your own mixes, design cover art for them, and you can even make money by sharing and promoting your mix! If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.

Pownce: Yeah, yeah: Twitter has mobile support and more users, but let’s face it; Pownce simply looks and feels better, mostly thanks to better organization options and a solid skinning support. Hell, even their 404 page is cool. Will it ever surpass Twitter in terms of users? Who knows; but us cool kids know which bandwagon we’re riding on.

Joost - it’s really not that hard being the coolest if you’re competing against big corporations and their almost-vaporware Hulu. Joost looks pretty slick, works well, but most importantly, it has done something that its competition wasn’t able to do - it revived the belief that watching quality TV program over the net is possible. To be completely fair, we need to mention two runners up: Veoh and Miro, which are also quite cool.

Mixx - Well, they do have quite a cool Digg-ripoff name. And the site doesn’t look like crap, which makes it better than the 99% of Digg clones out there. Will it make a long-term impact? Let’s be honest here: not many Digg-like sites do. But let’s applaud them for making a decent effort.

MyTinyJesus - No explanations. No FAQ. Just a figure of Jesus which keeps on emitting random Twitter posts in cartoon-like balloons. Pointless? Probably. Cool? Definitely.

FlickrVision - perhaps it was not the first such application, but David Troy’s FlickrVision (and its sister site, TwitterVision) was the one that started the trend: after it, everything that could possibly be visualized in real time on a Google Map got the same treatment. Again, it want win any awards for usefulness, but it can be quite mesmerizing.

StreetViewr - The chronology goes something like this: Google announces its Street View. People start finding cool stuff with it. Mashable compiles some cool street views into one post. Term “streetviewing” gets coined. StreetViewr takes over from there. At the time of this writing, StreetViewr has over 1700 images taken from Street View that are in some way interesting, and although it almost didn’t make this list because of the hideous color scheme, it’s still one of the best places to find cool street views.