In the grand scheme of so-called web 2.0 apps, this one isn’t earth shattering but it’s kinda nice: Listible.

What is it? Well, think of digg meets newsvine meets del.icio.us. Yes, it’s AJAX-y and social and “beta” as any web 2.0 thingy is nowadays (but no blog?!?…is that legal?)

Anyway, Listible takes advantage of the fact that we all love our lists. Not to-do lists, but the “Top 10 (whatever) I think is important” type of list. The kind that every newspaper does ad nauseum in December and bloggers do all year long. I know I’ve blogged my list of favorite this or that and they’re usually among my most popular entries. I like reading other people’s “My favorite (whatever) list” as it’s a good way to find out about plug-ins, extensions and other such tools I might not know were worth looking at otherwise.

So that’s Listible in a nutshell. Someone submits an idea for a list, maybe seeds it with a few “answers” of their own. Then the public is free to add to their list and vote up or down items on the list which creates the rankings. Think of del.icio.us as a big junk drawer with a tiny bit of structure (tags), while Listible is a whole lot structure (only one item can be the number one choice in the number one list) with just a little bit of social chaos thrown in to keep it going.

You can vote for the importance/relevancy of the list as a whole which will determine where that lists fits in the big list of lists (a la digg which lets votes decide what goes on the home page). Of course RSS feeds let you keep up with the list topics you find most interesting. Like I subscribed to the GTD list, and the Firefox extensions list.

What do I like the most about Listible? It’s just there. There’s no “we are going to change the world” fanfare. And that’s a good thing. You don’t have to sign up to fully understand what it is and what it does. It’s useful, but it if it disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t worry about any private data I entrusted to them. I’m not storing anything (like my bookmarks) on their server, and it’s not ruined by the mob-mentality as is digg or slashdot. Contributions actually improve the service, not just add to the noise. Have you read the comments in a digg entry? Wow, they can get quite vicious. Takes all the fun out of it for me.