The FWA (Favourite Websites Awards) Site Of The Year 2007 has been won by Get the Glass, a milk marketing site developed by Sweden's North Kingdom for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, USA.
Get the Glass was the overwhelming winner, and it is beautifully done. However, as one of the 115 judges, I voted for HBO's voyeuristic Voyeur, because I thought it was much more interesting and more progressive, and The FWA specialises in progressive, cutting-edge stuff.
In my view, Get the Glass isn't so much a website as a downloadable Flash game. It's superficial compared to Voyeur, which is slow but edgy.
If you have a really fast Internet connection -- 20Mbps might be enough -- have a look at a Japanese effort, I'm A Cyborg, but that's OK. It's basically dumb, but the unfolding paper graphics are wonderful.
Some other sites in the competition were relatively poor, in my view. Michelin - A Better Way Forward was memorably awful, though I'm doing my best to forget it. Hungry Suitcase and Air Jordan XX2 both managed to reach a high level of naffness.
However, of all the sites we looked at, there was only one I might go back to: Picnik. It's an online picture editing site that has some practical value, and a readily comprehensible user interface. In context, I guess both of those are unforgivable. No wonder it didn't win ;-)
Update: Picnik came third, which isn't a bad result.
