Online that year · 2007
98 matching entries
Grooveshark
Grooveshark was a chaotic, community-built music library where nearly any song seemed one search away.
Justin.tv
Justin.tv let people broadcast live video on the web. It grew from a personal lifecasting experiment into a place for many kinds of live channels, with viewers gathering around streams and their accompanying chats.
Microsoft Silverlight
Silverlight supplied a runtime for rich applications and media in supported browsers. It was part of a web where some experiences depended on installing additional software beyond the browser itself.
Nokia Ovi
Ovi was Nokia's umbrella for maps, mail, music, app downloads, and services before smartphone ecosystems consolidated.
Picnik
Picnik made photo editing playful in a browser, with text, effects, collages, and sparkle.
Windows Live Mail
Windows Live Mail supplied a desktop home for email accounts during the Windows Live and Essentials years. It continued the lightweight client tradition associated with Outlook Express and Vista's Mail.
Windows Vista
Windows Vista arrived in January 2007 after five years of development under the codename Longhorn. It brought the glassy Aero look, a searchable Start menu, desktop gadgets and much stronger security, launched with the slogan "The Wow starts now".
Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes let users combine and filter feeds through a visual editor. Connected modules turned a collection of web sources into a custom output, making the web feel like something you could rearrange for yourself.
iPod Touch
The iPod touch brought a touchscreen app experience to a device without the normal cellular-phone role. It could become a music player, games device, and portable internet companion at once.
Apple iWeb
iWeb let Mac users assemble personal websites through visual templates and page editing. It offered a direct path from photos and text to a small online home.
Firebug
Firebug was the Firefox extension that made inspecting and debugging web pages approachable. Editing styles while watching a page change helped turn the browser into a practical development workspace.
Flip Video
Flip Video cameras made filming simple: one big red button to record, a tiny screen, and a USB plug that flipped out of the side so the footage could go straight onto a computer and then to YouTube.
Google Code Project Hosting
Google Code Project Hosting gave open-source projects a place for repositories, bug reports, and documentation. Its plain project pages became familiar stops when downloading tools or searching for a fix.
Jaiku
Jaiku was an early microblogging service built around presence, status updates, and ambient social signals.
Nintendo Wii
The Wii put a motion-sensing remote in everyone's hand. Instead of competing on raw power, Nintendo made a console that grandparents could bowl with, and for a few years living rooms everywhere filled with people swinging at virtual tennis balls.
Twitter (the bird era)
Twitter started in 2006 as a way to post short status updates, first under the name twttr, with each message limited to 140 characters. That constraint shaped a new kind of writing: compressed jokes, live commentary, breaking news and arguments squeezed into a sentence.
Wii Shop Channel
The Wii Shop Channel was the Wii's online store, where players spent Wii Points on classic games through the Virtual Console and on smaller WiiWare titles made for the console. It launched alongside the Wii in November 2006.
Windows Photo Gallery
Photo Gallery combined organization, simple editing, and sharing around a personal image library. It belonged to the routine of bringing camera photographs onto a Windows computer and deciding what to keep or improve.
Zune Music Players
Zune players were Microsoft’s portable music hardware. Their interface and sharing features gave listeners an alternative to the iPod during the years when a dedicated music player still had its own place in a pocket.
Bebo
Bebo was a glittery friendship board where profile skins, quizzes, and top friends turned identity into a public collage.
BlackBerry Messenger
BBM made the BlackBerry PIN a social currency and turned message delivery marks into a language of their own.
Club Penguin
Club Penguin was a snowy social world where kids decorated igloos, adopted puffles, and attended parties in a browser.
Google Reader
Google Reader was the calm, powerful inbox for blogs and news feeds before social timelines swallowed the open web.
Google Talk
Google Talk brought instant messages and voice conversations to Google accounts. Its small desktop client and Gmail chat presence made quick exchanges feel like a natural extension of email.
Google Video
The original Google Video hosting service let users upload clips and embed them elsewhere on the web. It had a separate identity from YouTube before Google's video strategy centered increasingly on the latter.
Meebo Messenger
Meebo Messenger let people sign into several instant-messaging networks from a website. It was useful on shared computers where installing a separate client was inconvenient or impossible.
Megaupload
Megaupload was a file-hosting service used to store files and distribute them through links. It became a familiar destination for people following downloads from forums, blogs, and message boards.
The Matrix Online
The Matrix Online extended the film universe into a shared persistent game. Players could inhabit the setting rather than only watch its story, meeting others inside a recognizable fictional world.
Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers was the wonderfully unreliable public help desk where every question had an answer, whether or not it helped.
iGoogle
iGoogle made the browser homepage a tiny dashboard of weather, games, feeds, calendars, and gadgets.
iPod Nano
The iPod nano compressed a dedicated music-player experience into a smaller device through several changing designs. Its size made music feel easy to carry without turning the player into a full smartphone.
iPod Shuffle
The shuffle stripped a music player down to a very small, screenless experience. Listening depended less on browsing a visible library and more on accepting or advancing through the selected tracks.
City of Heroes
City of Heroes made a superhero identity the center of an online world. Character creation and cooperative activity let players become part of a city through a persona they designed.
Digg Classic
Digg turned collective voting into front-page news, complete with power users and comment wars.
Google Desktop
Google Desktop applied search to material on the user's own computer, including files and messages. It addressed a different problem from finding a public webpage: locating something remembered from personal use.
Hyves
Hyves built a major Dutch social-network identity around profiles, friendships, and personal expression. Its importance was rooted in a particular community and language environment rather than only global scale.
Orkut
Orkut turned communities and scrapbook messages into a social home, especially in Brazil and India.
Windows Live Spaces
Windows Live Spaces was a personal corner for blog posts, photo modules, guestbook-style comments, and profiles.
Delicious (del.icio.us)
Delicious, written del.icio.us in its early days, turned bookmarks from a private browser menu into something social. Save a link, add a few tags, and you could see what thousands of other people had saved under the same words.
Disney’s Toontown Online
Toontown Online was Disney’s cartoon multiplayer world. Players created animal characters and fought the businesslike Cogs with slapstick gags, making cooperative battles feel like a cartoon routine.
Myspace Classic
The original Myspace platform combined customizable profiles, music, blogs, and friend lists. The classic experience was replaced in the 2013 relaunch.
Skype
Skype made calling through a computer a recognizable everyday activity, later spanning many devices. Its contact list, ringing sounds, and video windows became associated with remote friendships and family conversations.
Star Wars Galaxies
Star Wars Galaxies let players build lives and activities inside the Star Wars setting. Its appeal included inhabiting the world with other people, beyond following a single fixed adventure.
Apple iPhoto
iPhoto made a personal photo collection a central part of the Mac experience. Importing, browsing, organizing, and sharing pictures could happen in a friendly dedicated library.
Friendster
Friendster introduced many people to public profiles, testimonials, and mapping friendship online.
Picasa
Picasa brought local photo folders, basic edits, and easy sharing together before every camera lived in a phone.
RapidShare
RapidShare let users upload files and pass around download links. Its waiting screens and premium-account options became familiar parts of sharing large files through forums and personal websites.
The Sims Online
The Sims Online turned the familiar idea of simulated daily life into a shared social environment. Other people occupied a larger role than in a private household simulation, changing what a visit could become.