In July 2006 Read/WriteWeb posted the first in what was to be a long and fruitful series on International web apps. The first post was on Germany, inspired at the time by The Museum of Modern Betas. This was when German social bookmarking site Mr Wong had a controversial cartoon logo! [they recently announced the finalists in their search for a new, less politically incorrect, logo] So it’s fitting that we look again at Germany now, nearly 1.5 years later. It’s also kind of ironic that The Museum of Modern Betas creator Markus Spath is now blogging for Blognation, which I’m sure took some inspiration for their network from RWW’s International series – which ran for about a year, ending with Canada in June ’07. It’s a virtuous circle of influences!
In his latest post for Blognation Germany, Markus rounds up The 100 Most Popular Web 2.0 Sites From Germany. Following is the top 20 — what struck me about it is that most of them are local sites and haven’t got a global audience (or if they have then it’s in a tiny niche market). The obvious exception is Pageflakes, but they are now based in Silicon Valley. So what does this say about the Internationalization of the Web? Are companies in Germany and elsewhere content to capture a sizeable local audience, and not go for the global market? Interested to read your thoughts… and we may re-start our International series again, to explore that theme.
 |
pageflakes (7129) – a start page and personal news aggregator |
 |
mindmeister (5679) – lets you create, manage and share mind maps online |
 |
ultimate-flash-face (4196) – fun site which lets you assemble faces via a minimalistic interface |
 |
websnapr (2318) – lets you capture screenshots of web pages or provide (slightly annoying) hyperlink target thumbnails |
 |
favicon.cc (2199) – create and share favicons |
 |
amberjack (2112) – lets you easily create site tours of your website |
 |
mypictr (2025) – a picture resizing service (e.g. to to create a custom profile avatar for social networks) |
 |
musicmesh (1770) – aggregates music videos from YouTube in an interesting way |
 |
studiverzeichnis (1653) – Germany’s largest social network for students and was largely inspired by Facebook. Earlier this year it was acquired by Holtzbrinck for an estimated 80 million euros. |
 |
pixer.us (1621) – edit your photos online using only your browser |
 |
popuri.us (1560) – check the link popularity of any site based on its ranking, social bookmarks, subscribers and more |
 |
logo-creatr (1455) – lets you instantly create Web 2.0 compliant logos |
 |
xing (1278) – a popular social network for business professionals. Xing went public in December 2006. |
 |
spreadshirt (1014) – lets you design and sell your own T Shirts (and accessories.) |
 |
map24 (994) – provides various map services, was acquired recently by Navteq |
 |
chefkoch (904) – a food and recipes community |
 |
fotocommunity (852) – online community for photography |
 |
mister-wong (786) – Germany’s most popular social bookmarking service |
 |
seitwert (729) – calculates the popularity of your site at various search engines |
 |
plazes (675) – detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby |
 |
photocase (606) – a community for photographers |
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)