ReadWriteWeb

About 18 months ago, we wrote about an obscure search startup from Germany called FAROO. We believed that its radical alternative, using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, had a shot at being a real disruptive force. Today, it has made some progress, has raised some money and is getting out into the market. (Disclosure: FAROO is currently a ReadWriteWeb sponsor).

FAROO is wisely underplaying P2P in its marketing, preferring more fashionable terms such as "real-time search" and "social discovery." But the P2P technology drives it.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - the first and still the best weekly newsletter for tech news and reviews - we present our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We tell you our picks for Best Mobile Apps, Best Consumer Apps, Best Semantic Web Apps, and more. Also in this weekly wrapup, we take a look at Facebook's new privacy controls, and ask whether Google and Yahoo! are giving away too much control over user identities to Facebook and Twitter. As well, we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Plus: this week we released our new premium report, about the Real-Time Web!

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series, below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009.

You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year.

If the rumors are true, then something is afoot in the Apple music camp. According to a recent article in Bloomberg, Apple is in talks to acquire online music service Lala. If a sale is finalized between the two companies, a number of new music monetization models can emerge and with Apple holding the supply chain from devices to players to downloads, a streaming music component may prove devastating to others.

International courier giant Fedex has just released a new tracking device and web service for packages. Called SenseAware, it keeps tabs on the temperature, location and other vital signs of a package - including when it's opened and whether it was tampered with along the way. Fedex is running a trial period of about a year with 50 health care and life science companies, for tracking delivery of surgery kits, medical equipment - and even live organs.

We spoke with FedEx head of innovation, Mark Hamm, about SenseAware and how Fedex is tapping into the emerging trend called Internet of Things.

Innovative real-time document collaboration software company AppJet, makers of Etherpad, has been acquired by Google. TechCrunch broke the news and AppJet promptly confirmed it. AppJet was started by ex-Googlers, got a YCombinator investment (you know, that firm that invests in anonymous college kids from around the country) and will now close down its own product to work on Google Wave.

What a cynical bore. Here's the new formula, meant only to tease users with innovation and ultimately enrich a select few Valley darlings:

Open-source users will be a bit less inclined to use MySQL following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

The news comes from a report by the 451 Group, which surveyed people in the open-source community about the issues surrounding the acquisition.

What are you going to buy this holiday season? Gift cards aren't very personal, but friends' recommendations can be.

Richard MacManus recently covered the trends in e-commerce over the past decade. He noted that Amazon and eBay have dominated the online retail market with their model of using implicit user data to generate recommendations for others. Although this model will surely remain a centerpiece of the online retail experience, it may soon face competition as "social shopping" takes off.

Tomorrow morning, teams from all across the United States will try to find 10 red balloons. The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to moor 10 red weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States, and whoever sends in the GPS coordinates of all the balloons first will win $40,000. With this event - called the DARPA Network Challenge - DARPA wants to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Arpanet - the predecessor of today's Internet. DARPA wants to test how the Internet, crowdsourcing and social networking can help to solve "broad-scope, time-critical problems." Read on to see how you can participate in this event.

The federal government reported today that the unemployment rate fell to 10% for the first time since the recession started last year.

But are the numbers accurate?

Mint.com is not so sure. The company is giving its own take on what it really means to be unemployed with an amusing video they are calling "The Unemployment Game."