Web Ware 100 Announced - Grand Central Winner

Congratulations to Grand Central, one of this year's Web Ware 100 award. Grand Central is one of the products I personally use daily, and it's good to see them get some larger recognition in the market. Another one of my favorites, Meebo, takes an honor as well.

The Web Ware 100 is decided by user votes, so I my initial reaction to seeing Microsoft Messenger as a winner needs to be checked (I muttered something unflattering about PR departments. Now I am wondering how many people voted from Mississippi.) Rafe has a good summary of the results, with an interesting element. Apparently, nearly 91% of the votes went towards the winners. As I am wondering about the broadband adoption rate in Mississippi, I am also wondering about the long tail phenomenon. I would expect to see a large group at the beginning, but more spread-out near the tail. From his post :

Overall, 91 percent of all votes cast were for winning products.

In many categories, there was a very steep drop-off between the top vote-getter and the No. 2 (and lesser) winners. In Browsing, for example, Firefox received 50 percent of all votes in the category, and the second-most-popular product, Opera, got only 13 percent.

The greatest disparity was in the Community category. Gaia Online won a staggering 91,293 votes--60 percent of the votes in its category and 19 percent of all votes cast in the awards.