The 15 Best Web Apps You've Never Heard Of

If popularity were a reliable indicator of a product’s greatness, the Big Mac would be the world’s best burger, Coca-Cola would be nutritious, and Microsoft wouldn’t have to spend billions to convince you to buy its software. Savvy computer users know that sometimes the best program is the one you haven’t yet used. So when we set out to find the ultimate online apps, we skipped the big sites that everyone already knows.

Sure, you can track your schedule with Google Calendar, watch videos on YouTube, and share pictures with friends on Flickr, but while these popular web apps certainly serve up great features, none of them is perfect. Meanwhile, the Internet is brimming with underdogs that are dreaming up some kick-ass new concepts—and putting them into action right now.

The rise of easier-to-use web development tools like Python and Ruby on Rails has caused an explosion of cool new web services that do everything from organizing your thoughts to tracking airfares across multiple travel sites to replacing your entire Office suite—and almost everything is free. Even as you read this, the world of web apps is expanding with cool new sites that take the features of your favorite old standbys and give them new, innovative twists. Some are terrible, but many are just plain brilliant, and we’ve narrowed down the field to 15 apps that will fundamentally change the way you use the web.

Wayfaring

On the road of life, it's best not to go it alone.

If all you want is directions to the nearest diner or coffee joint, MapQuest and Google Maps have you covered. But if you really want to explore your world, Wayfaring’s social mapping is a better way to go. The service is based on Google Maps but enhances the basic direction-finding service with a social networking interface that lets you create custom maps and share them with friends. Visiting a new town? Before you shell out for a guidebook, log on to Wayfaring and check out customized maps created by people who’ve actually been there. From dining options to museums to obscure attractions, you can pinpoint just about anything on Wayfaring.

Free, www.wayfaring.com

Zooomr

Three O's, unlimited uploads

Whether you’re fed up with daily upload and bandwidth limits or you’re just tired of letting Yahoo control your online life, Zooomr’s online photo-sharing features are bound to be greeted as liberators. The site’s biggest draw is its Infinite Upload interface, which lets you select every last bandwidth-hogging image on your hard drive and toss it onto Zooomr in one massive batch. You also get the usual array of captioning, organizing, geotagging, and sharing tools. At press time, Zooomr had just launched a paid Pro service, which adds video support and eliminates ads.

Free for basic account/$20 per year for pro account,
www.zooomr.com

Backpack

Simple organization for chaotic minds

Anyone with a Google account can track their calendars and to-do lists, but what if your needs are a little more unconventional? Backpack’s simple, customizable pages make it easy to organize your thoughts, no matter what you’re working on. Create lists and reminders; add notes, links, and versatile write boards; and share your pages with collaborators—or make them public. You can then link to them from other pages or email new entries to your pages from any device. The free service limits you to five custom pages, but the premium service enables up to 1,000 pages, a calendar, 500MB of file storage, and SSL encryption.

Free for basic accounts/$5–$14 per month for
premium accounts, www.backpackit.com

SoonR

Get to your PC from any phone or browser

When you need remote access to your files but don’t want to lug a laptop along, you need Soonr. This lightweight desktop utility syncs your files and Outlook email to SoonR’s website while you’re working and then serves them up via a clean web interface. The mobile-optimized service worked like a charm on every phone we tried it with, letting us grab and view images, Word docs, and spreadsheets easily. It also sports an organizer interface for Outlook calendars and lets you call your Skype contacts from your cell phone.

Free, www.soonr.com

Blinkx

12 million hours of video. No stupid self-submissions

Some people love whiling away the hours sifting through idiotic home-video footage on YouTube. If you don’t, try Blinkx. Built on a powerful search engine, Blinkx scours the web for videos, then analyzes and tags them for retrieval. So when you search for “White Stripes,” you’ll find the band’s videos, not a bunch of homemade vids of teenyboppers lip-synching to “Icky Thump.” Blinkx grabs videos from across the entire web, so it’s got everything YouTube, iFilm, Veoh, and the rest have, only more organized and with full-motion thumbnails. It includes a Safe Search control to filter out the dirty stuff—or not—and clicking a video’s title will take you straight to its source, so you can see it in its original context.