Bill’s Mind

May 31st, 2007

Top 25 Largest Web 2.0 Sites (May 2007)

I’ll make this quick. The featured article lists off the 25 largest Web 2.0 sites, based on the number of unique visitors per month. I’m going to tell you just how much I despise them :)

The List

1. MySpace.com - Hate it! If I had my way, I’d have you all shot!
2. Wikipedia.org - Love it! Most articles are highly informative and mostly accurate.
3. YouTube.com - Hate it! 99.44% of it is teens lip-syncing to music.
4. PhotoBucket.com - It’s alright, but I prefer Flickr.
5. FaceBook.com - Like it! It’s like MySpace, without the background music, eye-gouging colors and 40 pages of spam comments.
   

6. CraigsList.org - Love it! Simple, fast, to the point.
7. Flickr.com - Love it! Doesn’t try to be an all-in-one art site, healthy communities.
8. Digg.com - Hate most of it! The top stories are always retarded emo filth and infomercial reviews.
9. Wordpress.com - Love it! Great site, great software, great community!
10. Netscape.com - Who the hell is Netscape ? Just die already. Google pwns j00.
11. TypePad.com - It’s alright, but I prefer Wordpress.
12. CafePress.com - Love it! They’ve been around forever and their products sell!
13. Topix.net - Not bad, but nothing groundbreaking. Too many bleeding heart liberals!
14. Xanga.com - Hate it! Dumb name, and it’s nothing a good blogger can’t already do better.
15. FeedBurner.com - Love it! Finally a business that “gets” RSS.
16. Technorati.com - Love it! Keep tabs on all your favorite blogs and discover new ones.
17. LiveJournal.com - Hate it! It’s like a user-supported AdSense parking page.
18. Dailymotion.com - Hate it! What good is higher video quality when the content is still crap?!
19. Last.fm - Love it! Brilliant idea, but they just got bought out by CBS. CBS sucks!
20. del.icio.us - Love it! Like Digg without the attention whoring. You can discover sites much like Last.fm helps you discover music.
21. Friendster.com - Hate it! One of the oldest “friend sites”, but they don’t listen to their users.
22. iStockPhoto.com - Meh! A stock photo dollar-store. It’s like Comstock for kids.
23. StumbleUpon - Hate it! Spin the bottle with web sites. Most web sites suck. I ain’t puttin’ my lips on that!
24. LinkedIn.com - Hate it! Facebook for suits. If I wanted to hear about your latest business proposal, I’d watch TV at 4 in the morning.
25. Piczo.com - Hate it! Yet another pic/video/audio post for kids to litter with their artless filth.

The Result

10 sites I love
11 sites I hate
4 sites I don’t care about

The Analysis

In general, anything that’s dominated by teenagers quickly turns me off. I have better things to do than sift through a mountain of kiddie poop. The sites I love most tend to be older, and had been around for some time before the big Web 2.0/Ajax craze of 2006. They seem to rely less on flair, more on substance and usability, which is precisely what I want.

I often joke about making certain sites and venues 18+, but there seems to be a genuine market for adults-only sites, where the youngins can look but not post. It’s true that age does not directly correlate to maturity, but it’s a step in the right direction. The root of the problem is teenagers think they know everything, in reality they just haven’t yet realized they know nothing. I believe that by excluding the great majority of low-quality teen-produced content, we could have an “adult swim” version of most social networking sites, a safe haven for the rest of us to meet and discuss the topics that matter to the older generation of web users.