Check out [[http://www.ning.com/|Ning]]. They have made the next step in bringing web based apps to the user — by letting anyone create any app. Its pretty neat. You can create your own craigs list, or match.com or hot-or-not or any of the [[http://appideas.ning.com/|tons of ideas]] that Ning gives you. Or, just go and build something new.
I think its pretty cool. Exciting times.
[[http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1980|This article]] on ZDNet talks about some of the //Web2.0// products that showcased at the [[http://www.web2con.com/|Web2.0 conference]] going on right now. I really like Rollyo. Flock is all over the place last 2 days — but not much is known about what exactly it looks like. Wink looked //ok//, but I think Yahoo’s [[http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/|MyWeb2]] is a much hefty competitor for them.
[[http://zimbra.com|Zimbra]] is a desktop like web-based outlook replacement. Again, there is already a lot of competition in this arena (most notably, Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access and Yahoo’s upcoming redesign of the email interface). A more interesting news is the announced [[http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/004210.html|tie up between Google and Sun]] to develop a web based office app that would take on Microsoft Office.
A look at the list of sponsors of the Web2 con is a very good indication of the players in this field. My guess is that this entire Web2.0 thing will spawn off a whole bunch of startups that will (and are already) get consumed by the big players like Yahoo and Google.