iTunes is one of the hottest web services

LOS ANGELES (Web Watch) - Innovation flowered online this year, some three years after dot-coms started dying in the wake of the Internet investment bubble bursting. Here is a short list of what Web Watch considered some of the hottest Internet services in 2003, along with their new or improved features:

- iTunes: The iTunes Music Store (www.itunes.com) launched by Apple Computer in April was the big Web hit this year, selling 25 million song downloads at 99 cents apiece in 8 months!
- Friendster: The Web got a new twist on friendship when Friendster (www.friendster.com) debuted in March.
- Vonage and Skype: These two pioneering start-ups are pushing the boundaries of Internet telephony and challenging traditional phone companies (www.vonage.com and www.skype.com).
- Amazon.com: The Seattle-based retailer (www.amazon.com) added a "search inside the book" feature that lets people search the full text of 33 million pages inside 120,000 book titles from 190 publishers.
- Google: The 5-year-old search engine (www.google.com) added software for creating Web logs, or "blogs" and last month Google started testing a service similar to Amazon's that lets people search inside books.
- There: A fantasy world, called There (www.there.com), was born in January and is offering incredibly realistic graphics and life-mimicking experiences.