Time nominates websites like Flickr, Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia

Aug 31, 2009 10:42 GMT  ·  By

Time Magazine has spoken, and with a loud and powerful voice we might add. Its previous lists from 2007 and 2008 previewed many of the web's biggest hits even before they were on top of the world, so this year's list was eagerly awaited. The list is comprised of 50 websites that Time Magazine editors think have brought something unique to the online media or the Internet. Established companies haven't been ignored, Internet giants like Google, Wikipedia, and others alike have been also included thanks to the exceptional quality their services offer to users.

Here is the complete list: Flickr, California Coastline, Delicious, Metafilter, popurls, Twitter, Skype, Boing Boing, Academic Earth, OpenTable, Google, YouTube, Wolfram|Alpha, Hulu, Vimeo, Fora TV, Craiglook, Shop Goodwill, Amazon, Kayak, Netflix, Etsy, PropertyShark.com, Redfin, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, Kiva, ConsumerSearch, Metacritic, Pollster, Facebook, Pandora & Last.fm, Musicovery, Spotify, Supercook, Yelp, Visuwords, CouchSurfing, BabyNameWizard.com's NameVoyager, Mint, TripIt, Aardvark, drop.io, Issuu, Photosynth, OMGPOP, WorldWideTelescope, Fonolo, Get High Now and Know Your Meme.

Since they're not ranked, we cannot talk about any drop-outs of the list, but some notable entries can be found.

One of the most interesting of all is Internet Archive, a project founded in 1996 in San Francisco that took screenshots of pages around the web. It currently holds about three petabytes of data from 85 billion web pages and receives massive donations from the likes of Alexa. To have a better feel of what Internet Archive does, take a look at how Softpedia has been archived, at this link. It will show you how the Softpedia website looked through its history since 2003 until today.

Yelp is another entry in this year's list, the Time Magazine editors naming it “the mother of all review sites.” Usually ranked around the 350 position on Alexa, the five-year veteran has gathered quite a following in the US as the main review site around.

After making a huge splash in the 2008 Presidential Election, Nate Silver's special poll management and analysis technique has made out of his website, Pollster, one of the most advanced political prediction tools in the world.

We can all say “Finally!” that someone on the Time staff had the “time” to visit Vimeo's services and put it on the list. Since these days quality is something that all are after, Vimeo is to online video sharing what caviar is to food. Just something better than anything else in its class. High-quality videos, creative work and a strict user submission process put Vimeo on the list. Finally!

Ever wondered where did all this online video tutorial madness begin? The answer is MIT, when, in 2001, it began to make available some of the most popular courses on its webpage. Soon after, a bunch of universities followed its example and the world started getting crazy with websites like eHow or Expert Village. Academic Earth is probably a unique website in what it does. It not only presents online video tutorials or online courses, but it also filters them for quality content. And, to make users understand how exclusive this site is, only courses from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA and Yale are streamed on it.

The complete list with all of the descriptions from the Time editors can be found here.