Computers have always prospered because of people who sought after ways to fulfill the needs of users. When I look back at where applications and services were just a few years ago I have a hard time believing how far we’ve actually come.
We decided to create two different awards, one for the Most Innovative Services and another for the Most Innovative Products. This article covers the services, and tomorrow we’ll be taking a look at the products.
The 2007 CyberNet Award for Most Innovative Service goes to…
–3rd Place: Netvibes–
Netvibes continues to impress me with all of the work that they are doing, and what’s to come. It’s essentially the ultimate homepage because it has widgets to do just about anything. You can check your mail, write notes, manage a to-do list, chat with friends, search the web, and much much more.
What’s even better is the number of service-specific widgets they have available. They’ve created widgets for Alexa, Del.icio.us, Digg, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, and more. When you put all of this together you get a homepage that is unlike any other.
–2nd Place: Yahoo! Mail–
The new Yahoo! Mail definitely deserves a place on the list this year. They’ve introduced several features that are yet to be seen in other email services, such as a tabbed interface, integrated RSS reader, and “unlimited” storage space.
To add even more power to Yahoo! Mail the developers decided to integrate calendar and messaging capabilities right into the service. It would be even more amazing if Yahoo! would offer forwarding and POP/IMAP access for free.
–1st Place: Opera Link–
Opera has earned 1st place in this category for their newly launched Opera Link service. At first glance it may appear to be just a bookmark synchronization service, but it is so much more.
Once you setup Opera Link it will begin synchronizing your bookmarks, in addition to some other optional information. From there you will be able to access your bookmarks from any Opera desktop browser, and even from Opera Mini on your mobile device. Having all of the bookmarks from your desktop computer available on your mobile device is priceless, and can save incredible amounts of time.
If that’s not enough Opera Link also allows remote bookmark management through the link.opera.com website. This will work in any browser on any computer that has an Internet connection, thereby ensuring that you’re always connected to your favorite sites.
In the future I would expect that Opera will roll out Opera Link integration for their Opera Mobile and Opera Wii browsers, which will take the service to an entirely new level.
–And Your Winners–
Now it is time for you to chime in! Let us know in the comments who earned your “Most Innovative Service” award.
Opera may be pretty good for innovations like the new history search, the startpage and bookmarks backed up to their server but the later feature is far from being solid yet. That’s understandable as it is still in an Alpha testing phase. Two out of three ain’t bad as some would say but i would not give them a 10 out 10 reason being for this flaw.
Netvibes should be first if we want to talk about solid performance combined with improvements.
100% agree. Opera link is the most innovative piece of web technology created this year. It wasn’t a service that have gotten better, it simply is brand new.
Yahoo mail is something too. It has put Gmail to shame with its features.
Great post.
Newzie is the ultimate RSS feed reader and even notifies you when web pages of interest have been updated.
Had to be good to get me to drop Google reader.
I haven’t tried Opera Link myself yet, but I don’t see how is it so much innovative. Google Browser Sync has been available for a while now. There were also numerous scripts to sync bookmarks from Firefox, Opera, and MSIE between different locations for AGES. And then there are all those bookmarking services like del.icio.us, etc. Most of them provide buttons, toolbars, plugins, or bookmarklets to easily integrate with the browser of your choice. With that, you can easily keep your bookmarks synchronized between different locations.
The idea is a few years old, and there are so many available implementations of it, that I don’t see how it fits the innovation wave in the end of 2007.
Agree except Yahoo! Mail which I think is one of the worst bloated services. Their customer services sucks too…for the past few days, I haven’t been able to sign OUT of Yahoo! Mail and their customer service is useless….loading also takes a hell lot of time compared to Gmail or Hotmail…although feature-wise it’s nice, it’s performance, implementation and annoyances are many and it’s UI is too cluttered. Definitely not one of the top apps.
I love Yahoo Mail. Each to their own
@Ryan:
I would vote for “My Yahoo” as the Most Innovative Service Award for 2007. You can customize this Website to your heart’s delight. Some of the options available are: news, calendar, event planner, bookmarks, Wall Street portfolios, weather, your favorite teams scoreboards and a whole lot more.
This place is so great, I have selected it as my Home Page. It recently got an excellent facelift from Yahoo.
URL: [my.yahoo.com]
Regards,
Omar.-
I should place Opera Links 1st
Yahoo! My Yahoo 2nd
Paint.Net is neither a bird of the year, neither a service. But I like it enough to give it a 3rd place.
Placed as they come to my mind.
Wow, I’m surprised you gave Y!Mail a spot on the list. Nice, I’d say it sure earned it.
The reason why I believe this is such a big deal is because it synchronizes your bookmarks with your mobile browser. I don’t know if you use a web browser on your cellphone, but having all of my desktop bookmarks available on my cellphone is a huge time saver. I can’t stand typing in websites into my phone!
The performance of Yahoo! Mail is actually rather good for me. The first time I load it in my browser it’s a bit slow, but after I’ve got most of the stuff cached it’s pretty quick.
Just because I don’t use a service or product doesn’t mean I don’t recognize when they step out of the box. I’m the same way with Mac’s…I don’t use them but I never hesitate to point out the things that they do right.
The new My Yahoo! is definitely pretty nice, but I still have to give Netvibes the slight edge because of their enhanced widgets that they offer. Particularly their integrated feed reader that is really impressive.
Ryan,
thanks for the explanation. I get your point.
Still, I’d prefer some way of accessing my del.icio.us bookmarks. Either via [mobilicio.us] service or like described in [micropersuasion.com]