Next week we’ll publish Read/WriteWeb’s annual Best Web Companies and Innovators post. Also coming next week is the 2007 Web Trends post (I’d hoped to do it this week, but it’s now Saturday where I live and I’m exhausted!). Anyway I’d like to tap the minds of the R/WW community some more, before I write the Best Of post. So I’m looking for feedback in particular on Best Web LittleCo of 2006 and Most Promising Web Company/Innovator.
To give you an idea of what we’re looking for, last year 37Signals was Best Web LittleCo and Memeorandum & Digg.com were Most Promising. The latter category is designed for companies or services that have burst onto the scene this year, but probably won’t reach their potential until next year or in the near future. That has certainly been the case with Digg and (the re-named) Techmeme in 2006.
In 2004, R/WW named Ludicorp (the then independent company that created Flickr) as Best Web LittleCo, and Feedburner as Most Promising.
For Best Web LittleCo this year, already someone has suggested Meebo. I’d love to get more suggestions from the community on this – so please leave a comment. Try and think of startups or small companies that have had a particular impact this year – and why.
We’ve already gotten a great idea of who you think is best Bigco of 2006, via our poll earlier this week. The poll is still open, but as of now the results are overwhelmingly in favor of one company: Google. 55% of you think Google has been the most impressive BigCo this year. Followed by Apple on 15% and Amazon on 14%. Yahoo (last year’s winner) and Microsoft have only 7% and 5% respectively! The big question when deciding the R/WW winner is the balance between bigco innovation and the impact it has on a mass market.
So what are your thoughts, especially on Best Web LittleCo for 2006 and most Promising Web Company/Innovator? Also let us know if you’d like us to do a category-by-category breakdown of the year’s best Web products.
