I had written a nice, long post using Performancing (to test it out) about why I (biasedly) thought Amazon was the Best Web Bigco in 2005 over Richard MacManus' Yahoo! pick. That is, until something happened and I lost that post. So, I'm not rewriting it. Oh well.

What I do want to write about -- since everyone else is doing it -- is a "Best of 2005." My take will be the Most Influential Person of 2005. Specifically, I'll be posting in terms of Web 2.0.

Note: Frankly, I don't really care about what you think of the term 'Web 2.0'; you know what I mean when I use it.

First the runners-up, then the winner:

• Larry Page & Sergey Brin: Certainly the most talked about company of 2005, Google rocked.... everything (GMail made improvements, the search engine made improvements, they killed the stock market, almost every mashup made use of Maps, etc, etc).
• Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, and 37Signals crew: They made rockin' products, and shared the wealth with the world in form of Ruby on Rails. Their audience of around 17,000 blog readers means they reach a lot of people and influence many decisions.
• Evan Williams: Former Pyra/Blogger founder left Google to start Odeo, bringing podcasting to the masses (along with Steve Jobs and iTunes).
• Tim O'Reilly: He created the Web 2.0 meme and the conference which backs it. He helped fund companies such as Odeo, and he even attempted to write the definition of Web 2.0.
• Joshua Schachter: Creator of del.icio.us, probably one of the most widely used Web 2.0 sites and services. Acquired by Yahoo! near the end of the year.
  
• Jeff Bezos: The founder and head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos is ultimately responsible for innovative products like Mechanical Turk, 43 Things, Alexa Web Search Platform, and tagging on Amazon product pages.
• Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake: Founders of Flickr, a staple of Web 2.0 success, this couple sold Flickr and now work for Yahoo. Fake now runs some of Yahoo's social products.
• Robert Scoble: A Microsoft employee and evangelist who is helping to drive a lot of change within the aging organization, his reach is far and wide through his blog, Scobleizer.
• Gabe Rivera: Founder of Memeorandum, Gabe has changed the way many influentials and non-influentials alike read their tech and political news. His algorithms find important news items in near real-time.
• Kevin Rose: Former TechTV reporter and founder of Digg, another news site, but this time powered by users, digg has also transformed the way many find their news.
  

And the winner....

• Michael Arrington: The founder of six-month old blog, TechCrunch, he's quickly risen into the A-list of bloggers. Profiling (and probably making or breaking) companies and services, he reaches tens of thousands of readers. Still others show up at his house near the Valley to demo and show off their new products, hoping to get a link on the blog. While I don't always agree with his opinion on certain topics, he is definitely the most influential person right now in the Web 2.0 world. If he makes a statement, the blogosphere tends to listen.
  

In an effort to stay as transparent as possible, I wanted to write a quick blurb about our growth and, more specifically, our stability.

Within just a few weeks we've grown pretty quickly. Over the next couple of weeks and months, we're going to be releasing some really great improvements and applications (think: AJAX, file systems, extensions, UI). My only guess is that we'll continue to grow with these improvements. This has been - and hopefully will continue to be - an amazing little ride.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to growth. One drawback for us has been scalability issues. During the initial few days after launch, we saw a couple hours of downtime due to what we concluded were memory leaks which we never noticed before.

We fixed those leaks and added some alarms to notify us when something bad was about to happen. This helped for a few days. Then the alarms started sounding every once in a while. Turns out this time our growth had simply put us near the edge of memory limits on our little machine.

We bought some more RAM and installed a newer kernel, only to find out later that day that the server was crashing unexpectedly. It didn't seem like a memory issue though? A day and some investigation later, we found out this was actually a known bug in the new kernel.

We rolled the kernel back one minor version and have been healthy (knock on wood) for a few days now.

However, we're still not ready for massive growth yet. So, as well as releasing many new features and applications, we're going to be working extremely hard on allowing our service to scale to infinity. That's the goal, and we think we have the design which will achieve that -- now we just have to implement it.

That noted, over the next few weeks we'll be modifying the software and adding some hardware so you might see some initial slowdowns while we fine tune the system but hopefully the end result will be a much faster, more stable, more redundant, and overall better experience for you.

Tomorrow Maurice and I will be attending the Snakes and Rubies event at DePaul in Lincoln Park, Chicago. It's one of the few really great tech meetups that I've heard about in Chicago, so it should be fun.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, and Adrian Holovaty, one of the creators of Django (a Python framework) will be debating and discussing web applications.

According to the RSVP list, over 140 people are expected. That's awesome, I can't wait to meet some. If you're going, look at my picture on this blog and come say hello!

Also, I'll be trying to live blog some of it, provided there's connectivity (I'm assuming there will be).

Given the (lack of) complexity of this task, it took way too long to complete, but I'm happy it finally happened. We've received a couple requests for a developer community and we thought that was a great idea. Basically, we wanted a place where developers could interact with us (Maurice and I) as well as with other developers. We also wanted it to be a place where developers could look for answers to questions that may have already been asked.

So, rather than implement something custom, we chose to go with the easy-to-use, Google Groups. Our group, Openomy Developers' Community, is now created and we started it off with a thread requesting feedback on how to provide the best authentication for non-web apps.

If you're interested in developing applications, please check this out and let us know what you think. Oh, and by the way, if you ever feel that you want to contact either Maurice or myself privately, don't hesitate to do so; this group isn't a replacement for email, it's an addition. Both our email addresses are posted publicly on our blog.