PC Mag released their yearly Top 100 Website list of 2009 (I guess the other five months left in the year don't count), though they aren't ranked in any particular order. But first few entries are really indicitive of some growing trends on the web.

Some of the popular sites in the list are web applications. Tools for both productivity and distraction that would have been tradtionaly installed to the operating system and used locally have made its way online, often referred to as cloud computing. Meebo is a multi-client instant messenger application taking place of installed applications like Pidgin and Trillian. It's missing some of the bells and whistles like chat history, but the core functionality is there.

Google Docs is another big one that we frequently make use of here at Silverscape for collobarating on documents while we are producing sites. Normally we would be forced into working on one document at a time, locally. Then save it onto a network drive for one other person to have the ability to edit, and everyone else having read-only access. And the most current version is as recent as the last attachment in your email, or when the last time you opened the file with read-only access. Google docs lets you collaborate all at once and see updates and changes, in real-time, anywhere with web access.

Mint is another site I have personally started to use for making budgets. You can tie it directly to your credit cards, bank accounts, and any kind of loans you may have. It has tools for tracking your purchases and generates all kinds of nice charts and graphs to help you visualize where all your money is going. Again, another tool that would have been relegated locally to your computer using information that you would typically have to manually enter.

Of course there's the time wasters. But it should be no surprise that most of these time wasters are fueled by the users of the site. Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook. By now you all should have heard of them but they have been becoming more entrenched in everyday usuage. Senators tweeting while congress in session, politicians campaigning through YouTube. When some old foagies in Washington are doing it, you know it's big. Yelp started out as a community resturaunt review site, but it now encompasses all kinds of business. I didn't have any personal reccomendations for a dentist in my area, but found one through Yelp and was pleased.

So we're really seeing the masses of the web flocking online for productivity, leaving behind some old tradtional desktop apps, and entertainment resources driven by users. Seems like every year PC Mag and other sites do these lists, they consist more and more of sites like these. Some new faces of course but many of the familar ones with bigger userbases.

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