Time magazine has released its annual Top 50 websites feature and this year – unlike last year’s list – isn’t as predictable as you think.

In a sometimes strained bid to remove itself from the predictability of last year’s list – which included Google, YouTube, Facebook and Skype – Time magazine’s Top 50 Website’s of 2010 has opted to give some of the smaller hitters a boost in 2010.

By a boost we mean that the likes of Google, YouTube and Facebook didn’t even make the list.

YouTube rival Vimeo – a “respectful” community website of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos – made the number one spot -for being more intuitive than YouTube.

Gowalla was dubbed more fun than Foursquare and LinkedIn was rated as “informative without being intrusive, for opening the channels of communication without veering too casual or random, LinkedIn is the forum we still believe in,” according to the magazine.

WikiLeaks has made the top five News and Info list, but then again, so has The Onion.

The list is accompanied by the magazine’s own complementary piece, “The Five Most Overratted Websites”.

News Corp’s MySpace gets its regular pasting for not being innovative enough, while Craigslist is too boring, even for a classifieds listing.

The real interest is the vote against news aggregator slash social network Digg, criticised again for not keeping up with the likes of social networking heavyweight Facebook.

Here’s the full Top 50 list: Read the rest of this entry »