With a New Year just starting out, how better to spend our time than to take yet another look at the top players in Web 2.0? Tech Crunch does us this service in its recent article on Mike’s favorite Web 2.0 applications. Since much of the list contains old favorites like Gmail, Digg and Flickr I have decided to cull the list to a more manageable, and possibly more interesting top 3.

Techmeme

TechMeme is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. Stuff on TechMeme hits the New York Times and other newspapers days later. My father is as addicted to Techmeme’s political sister site, Memorandum, as I am to the technology news area. Our coverage of TechMeme is here and here.

This is absolutely the most interesting meta-news source I have had the pleasure of reading. It’s hard for your average user to cut through the mass of information that the internet has to offer, TechMeme packages it all in the most user friendly and coherant fashion I have yet to see.

Wordpress

We’ve been mostly happy customers of Wordpress since TechCrunch started. It’s the most flexible blogging platform, and their Akismet comment spam blocking service has saved us from nearly 1 million spammy comments. We’d have to hire a full time person just to moderate comments and trackbacks. Our coverage of Wordpress is here.

Wordpress is my favorite blog engine and for good reason. It is easy to hack, has an obscene number of plugins and widgets and can be set up out of the box in less than five minutes. If there are any problems with Wordpress, I have yet to find one that would push it off the top of my list.

Netvibes

Netvibes is another holdover from last year. We go there multiple times per day to get a quick overview of a few important feeds. The company continues to gain users at a torrid pace, and has plenty of money in the bank after a $15 million round earlier this year. My guess is Netvibes is fending off multiple acquisition offers at this point, and may not be an independent entity at the end of 2007. Our coverage of Netvibes is here.

Netvibes makes the list on sheer “cool factor”. Personalized homepages have been done to death, but as is the case with all Web 2.0 properties, the real trick is to do it better and Netvibes does just this. If you have yet to try it out, I suggest you give it a look.