While the service normally provides more complex information around a certain brand, as in its tracking of the Domino's Pizza PR disaster this past September, the top 50 list takes an easier approach: how many unique sources mentioned a brand over the past year.

So what brand was the talk of the town in 2009?

Google, which had previously held the number one spot, took second prize and Facebook jumped up six spots to round out the top three.

While you can take a look at the full list of 50 top brands yourself, Buzz Study had this to say about the results:

The list certainly shows that 2009 was the year of Social Media. Twitter moved ahead of Google to take the number 1 spot, while Facebook and MySpace made significant leaps over big brands as well. Most video game related brands were down this year as well, including Sony, Wii, Xbox, and Nintendo. It also appears TV brands all jumped this year including Disney, MTV, Fox, BBC, CNN, ESPN, and ABC.

Blackberry, MTV and Starbucks were among the top movers in this years list, with each rising 17, 13 and 12 spots respectively. Canon, Samsung and Intel were the hardest hid on the list, dropping 17, 16 and 13 spots from last year.

Without further ado, here are our predictions for 2010. We'd love to read your predictions in the comments.

Richard MacManus, Founder & CEO, @rww

1. There will be a breakthrough consumer application for Internet of Things - involving the iPhone, RFID tags and a major consumer product such as books or groceries. In general, Internet of Things will ramp up in 2010, with thousands more everyday objects becoming connected to the Internet.

2. Google will acquire PostRank and promptly consign it to the same graveyard Feedburner went to.

3. Microsoft will acquire Wolfram|Alpha and Bing will continue to make small gains in the search market. Google will be distracted by increasing consumer complaints about content farms polluting Google search results.

4. A price war will erupt in the e-book market and Amazon.com will offer the lowest prices, leading to it gaining a dominant position in the market with its Kindle E-book Reader.

5. Google will partner with a large PC manufacturer from Asia, which will launch an inexpensive netbook powered by Chrome OS in the U.S. market. It will become a hot consumer item among school kids and university students.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer & VP of Content Development, @marshallk

1. Google Wave will win some respect back as people discover valuable uses for it and get used to the user experience.

2. Facebook will open aggregate-user-profile and social-graph data for outside analysis.

3. Some serious user interface innovations will blow our minds.

4. Data portability will become more real, standard, expected and viable.

5. A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from; it may be mobile and location-centric; it may focus on personal content recommendations.

Sarah Perez, Feature Writer, @sarahintampa

1. MySpace doesn't quite make a comeback, but gets a fresh start of sorts with its music and entertainment offerings. The Gen Y/Gen Z demographic sees growth on the site but the network's overall numbers continue to decline.

2. Twitter launches ads.

3. TweetDeck finally launches a web version and becomes the number one Twitter client other than Twitter.com.

4. Cloud computing heats up. AWS, Google, Microsoft and others begin price wars to compete for customers.

5. The iPhone still rules and grabs more mobile market share than ever before.

6. Meanwhile, Android becomes the number two mobile platform by year-end.

7. iPhone app backlash begins. There are too many worthless apps and no decent way to find the good ones. Then Apple surprises us with a brand-new feature that improves greatly upon their "genius" offering to help us find new and useful apps via iTunes.

8. iTunes announces a web service, thanks to the Lala acquisition.

9. Spotify finally gets the green light in U.S. and people go nuts for it.

10. The netbook craze dies down. People start buying new "in-between" devices that are slightly larger and more powerful than today's netbooks, but smaller, more lightweight and cheaper than regular notebooks. Features like better processors, separate GPUs and SSD HD options set these new "ultra portable" devices apart from the traditional netbook, but they're still often called "netbooks" because of their size. Market confusion ensues.

Jolie O'Dell, Writer & Community Manager, @jolieodell

1. MySpace relaunches as a content network, leveraging the bands and filmmakers they already have on board and dropping the emphasis on social networking.

2. Twitter will find a monetization model and launch things like ads and pro features.

3. Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with "the Internet." They'll make more money and control more data than ever before.

4. iPhone's exclusivity with AT&T will come to a breaking point and we'll see network-agnostic iPhones.

5. On the bright side, 2010 will signal the death of the login. Third-party authentications will become the norm, and user data will be entrusted to a discrete handful of online properties. Users will pitch a hissyfit if ever they're asked to create a username and password and upload an avatar. After all, doesn't the Internet know they have a Facebook?

6. File-sharing will continue to be shut down around the world; by 2011, we'll all be downloading via Tor and the U.S. will have instituted a lame three-strikes-no-Internet policy.

7. Cybercrime will be more of an issue than ever. Expect to see a major governmental security breach in 2010, as the government continues to adopt 2.0 tech without strong and permanent infosec personnel and procedures in place.

Dana Oshiro, ReadWriteStart Writer, @SuzyPerplexus

1. AR: Geo-locational games and AR will come together in 2010. We're going to see strange behavior from those playing zombie shooter games on their commutes.

2. Agree with Sarah: Netbooks and gadgets like the PsiXpda are going to gain ground.

3. Mobile Music: Offline music caching will be expected of all streaming music apps.

4. The browser really will be the new OS.

5. Payment Systems: Between Square, PayPal X and advances in Internet TV, we're going to see payment options integrated in unlikely places.

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise Writer, @podcasthotel

1. Cloud computing will go through a shake out. There are just too many companies out there for the market to sustain. The big players will go on a buying spree. The consolidation will deeply affect users. Some companies will fold overnight. Users will lose access to their data, leading to a whole new wave of skepticism about cloud computing. But it won't be enough to slow down the move to cloud computing. More companies will consider the security risks as less of a factor, compared to the cost benefits and potential for innovation. Cloud computing technology will become more of a commodity. The business applications for cloud computing will take center stage.

2. The big players will come back strong. IBM, SAP and Microsoft will innovate just enough to show big gains with customers.

3. Consumer-based social networks will make big efforts to gain wider access to the enterprise, as more companies seek to open up to the social Web. The information architecture of social networks will change to accommodate the greater degrees of control that the enterprise requires. This will bring on the rise of "social middleware" - services that act as a layer between social networks and the enterprise.

4. A new breed of social networks will emerge that act as one-stop shops for applications and services. These will look more like marketplaces than social hubs for conversations around the proverbial virtual water cooler. SaaS leaders will face off for this growing market.

5. iPhone, Android or the Blackberry? I expect the Android to be the talk of the enterprise, especially if the Google Phone does make it to market. Such a phone would eliminate carrier costs and break down walled gardens that have limited application development.

Sean Ammirati, COO, @SeanAmmirati

1. Facebook will go public and the IPO will be a huge financial success.

2. Hyperlocal advertising will heat up, delivering another nail in the traditional newspaper industry's coffin. (Very similar to one of my 2008 predictions, but this time focused on the advertising aspects.) Specifically, it will be more common for a local establishment to pay marketing dollars to Yelp or FourSquare, for example, then their local newspaper.

3. Apple will release an "iTablet" and the world will be a better place for it. OK, more accurately we'll all think the world is a better place for it.

4. Agree with Jolie regarding "the death of the login." I'm hoping for open distributed alternatives along with Facebook and a handful of others.

5. Between Boxee's continued development and a new AppleTV (hopefully synched with their iTablet), it will become much more common to enjoy the Internet on a TV.

Elyssa Pallai, Marketing & Experience Manager, @boulderservices

1. Skype becomes increasingly pervasive, as the younger generations force their parents to get online, and consumers find new and interesting ways to cut costs and save money.

2. Software as service becomes ever more popular, as businesses and governments choose to focus on their core business and realize the benefits of lightweight technologies in the cloud - including rapid deployment and the low cost of switching.

3. The online user experience has a renaissance, as web browsers and hardware become more sophisticated and designers and developers take advantage of that.

4. The growth of Internet of Things continues, RFID tags in everything. The initial bugs will make funny things happen all around us.

5. iPhones and other smartphones become the purchasing tool of choice.

6. Consumers bypass carriers and create open wifi networks for all (which is already happening but not en mass).

Jared Smith, Webmaster, @jaredwsmith

1. Backlash against the App Store causes more and more developers to defect to Android and competing platforms.

2. Google Chrome's market share increases at Firefox's expense. Internet Explorer continues to lose ground as more rich, HTML5-aware Web apps spring up on the scene.

3. Opera begins to struggle, as WebKit becomes the rendering engine of choice on mobile devices.

4. Social analytics features explode onto the scene in 2010. Twitter opens Pro accounts, including analytics and an API to access them. Google strikes a deal to integrate Twitter analytics with its Google Analytics product.

You can listen to the show at noon today on Blog Talk Radio. We will post the recording after the live event.

Show Details:

RWW Live Special: 2009 Year in Review

Time: Noon PST, (GMT -8)

Link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/readwriteweb

Our pick for Most Promising is something that could change the way people search on the Web.

Last week we announced that Google was our choice for Best BigCo of 2009, due to its product innovation in 2009. Today we're announcing Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company, as selected by the ReadWriteWeb writers.

• In 2008 we chose web office vendor Zoho as Best LittleCo and Brightkite as our Most Promising. Zoho is still competing well above its weight bracket against office software giants like Microsoft and Google. However it's fair to say that Brightkite hasn't delivered as much on its promise as we thought it might, due in part to the emergence of Foursquare as 'the next big thing' in mobile social networking.
• In 2007 Twitter was Best LittleCo and in a break from tradition we named "the open source movement" as most promising. Twitter, of course, has since gone on to make a huge impact on the Web and media.
• In 2006 YouTube was Best LittleCo and Sharpcast Most Promising. YouTube was acquired by Google in October of that year.
• In 2005 37Signals was Best LittleCo and Memeorandum (now Techmeme) and Digg were joint Most Promising.
• In 2004 Ludicorp, creators of Flickr, was Best LittleCo and Feedburner Most Promising. Both went on to be acquired, by Yahoo! and Google respectively.

Now let's find out who is ReadWriteWeb's Best LittleCo of 2009. Then on page 2 we name our Most Promising company for 2010.

Best LittleCo of 2009: Aardvark

Aardvark (our initial review and then a comparison review) is a social search engine that combines artificial intelligence, natural-language processing and presence data to create what the company calls "the real-time Web of people." The company was founded in 2007, but the product only launched in March 2009 at SXSW. It quickly became one of the companies we point to most when we discuss the Real-Time Web, one of the most significant trends of this year.

In our report on the Real-Time Web released in November, we described how it works:

"You can ask Aardvark any question, and it will try to find a person in your extended social circles who knows about that topic and is available to answer at that moment. Aardvark facilitates these conversations through a very polite IM bot, an iPhone app with push notifications, the company's website, Twitter or email. Instead of broadcasting your question to every one's stream of information, Aardvark delivers the question only to people who are relevant and available."

Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered.

As we noted in our report, Aardvark's got an all-star team of engineers from Google and Yahoo and high-profile investors. It's already cutting deals with major tech brands and is rumored to be on Google's acquisition list. Whatever happens to the company, the use cases for Aardvark are just beginning to be explored.

In short, Aardvark impressed us a lot this year and it made no fewer than 3 of our 2009 best-of lists:

• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009
• Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009
• Top 10 Startup Products of 2009

Aardvark's iPhone app was also popular with our writers, two of them putting it in their top 5 mobile web applications of the year.

Next page: ReadWriteWeb's Most Promising Company for 2010...

Most Promising: Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha launched in May and ended up making our list of the Top 10 Consumer Products of the year. It was also the most hyped, with the possible exception of Google Wave.

Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer. But Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. It also enables users to compute and calculate things off that information.

While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too - although not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems.

Wolfram|Alpha also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price.

We listed some initial use cases for Wolfram|Alpha in July, but it's a safe bet to say that the best of this product will be seen in 2010 and beyond.

If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data, so we think it's a product to watch in 2010.

Now let us know your thoughts on our picks for Best LittleCo (Aardvark) and Most Promising (Wolfram|Alpha).

Finally, this week we announced our 6th annual Best BigCo award. Read on to find out which big Internet company impressed us the most in 2009.

If you think Twitter is big, get ready for the real-time Web by reading The Real-Time Web and its Future. We conducted interviews with 50 companies and innovators in real-time technology.

"The report is excellent - a great synthesis of why the real-time Web is different, what changes, what doesn't and what the industry needs to do in order to press forward."
- John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks

"It blew our minds... inspiring."
- Favit

"Recommended."
-Hewlett-Packard Official News

We're flattered by the initial praise. You can download the report, take a look at the Table of Contents and this sample chapter, and keep an eye out for the 2-report package that allows you to save money on previous reports when you buy our latest installment.

The print version is coming soon!

Buy Now >>

Reader Picks: Best Web Products of 2009

This week we ran a reader poll, asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December.

The poll has now closed and we're pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community's Top 10 Web Products of 2009.

Here is the final top 10:

1. Twitter

2. Google Chrome

3. Google Maps

4. Facebook

5. WordPress

6. iPhone platform

7. Google Apps

8. Adobe AIR

9. Hulu

10. TweetDeck

For more analysis, read our announcement post.

Best BigCo 2009

In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. This week we announced the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005.

For 2009, the ReadWriteWeb team chose Google as our Best BigCo.In our top 100 products list for 2009, seven Google products made the cut:

• Android platform
• Google App Engine
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome
• Google Maps
• Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
• Google Voice

And we didn't even include Google Wave, its biggest launch of the year. We think Wave has a lot of potential, but it's clearly at the experimental stage still. The web browser Chrome was probably the Google product that had the biggest impact this year.

Read more about Google and the other nominees...

Best Web Products of 2009

In what's become an annual tradition, every December ReadWriteWeb selects the best Web products of the past year. In a series of 10 articles, we examined the top web products in categories ranging from consumer web apps to RSS and syndication platforms.

Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009

We kicked off the series with a look at the top mobile web products of the past year. This is a subjective list of editorially selected products, but one which includes some of the biggest names in mobile web applications for 2009.

Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009

Every year at ReadWriteWeb, we look at hundreds of new web apps aimed at everyday users. Occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web. Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009.

Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009

2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. The 10 products we've picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more.

Top 10 International Web Products of 2009

Thriving tech communities exist around the globe, from Toronto to Tel Aviv, and the success of internationally-based web products serve as a reminder to all of us that innovation knows no borders.

Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year.

Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009

2009 may be remembered as the year that enterprises truly understood the importance of social software. This was manifested by the rise of enterprise collaboration services, cloud computing technologies and the growing importance of mobile technologies for the enterprise.

Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009

2009 has been a turning point for the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as lights, cars and packages) get connected to the Internet. This trend has added a significant amount of new data to the Web, so for that reason alone it is an important development.

Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009

The real-time web was hot this year and it's likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We've tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future. Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 to find out.

Top 10 Startup Products of 2009

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009

2009 has been a big year for mobile and real-time technologies, which is reflected in our selection of the top 10 Web platforms of the year.

That's a wrap for another week. Enjoy your weekend everyone and happy Christmas!

The poll has now closed and we're pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community's Top 10 Web Products of 2009.

Here is the final top 10:

2. Google Chrome

3. Google Maps

4. Facebook

5. WordPress

6. iPhone platform

7. Google Apps

8. Adobe AIR

9. Hulu

10. TweetDeck

So there you have it, Twitter was the best product of 2009 according to ReadWriteWeb readers! Relatedly, Twitter desktop client TweetDeck made the list at #10.

Google had 3 products in the top 3: Chrome (#2), Maps (#3) and Google Apps (#7). This more than justifies their selection by our editors as Best BigCo of 2009.

Honorable Mentions, #11-25

The following products missed out on the final top 10, but they were all popular picks among our community. Many of them are startup products, so they can be proud to say they're among the top 25 products of 2009 according to our readers. In alphabetical order:

• Android platform
• Bing
• DropBox (note: DropBox was missing from the original top 100, but we're including in the top 25 due to the number of comment-votes it received on the original post)
• Evernote
• Facebook iPhone app
• Feedly
• Google Voice
• Open Calais
• Posterous
• Mint
• Spotify
• Tumblr
• Tweetie
• Wolfram Alpha
• Woopra

That's it, the culmination of our Best Products 2009 series. Hope you all enjoyed it and we look forward to another year of innovation in web technology in 2010!

Make your picks in the poll embedded below. You can cast up to 10 votes. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too.

The year's top 10 products, as selected by the RWW community, will be announced tomorrow. Here is the current top 10, in alphabetical order:

UPDATE: The poll is now closed, CLICK HERE TO SEE RESULTS.

Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical

In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005. Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let's find out...

The ReadWriteWeb team has chosen Google as our Best BigCo of 2009! Google last won it in 2006 and this is the third time we've honored the Mountain View company.

Google is without question the predominant Internet company of our time; in large part because it continues to innovate and stay one step ahead of its competition.

In our top 100 products list for 2009, seven Google products made the cut:

• Android platform
• Google App Engine
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome
• Google Maps
• Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
• Google Voice

And we didn't even include Google Wave, its biggest launch of the year. We think Wave has a lot of potential, but it's clearly at the experimental stage still.

The web browser Chrome was probably the Google product that had the biggest impact this year. Launched in late 2008, Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn't offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet. However it has already changed the browser market. As we wrote in our Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 review, Chrome's relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars, and is changing the way developers and Google's competitors think about browsers.

Chrome is also the basis for Google's upcoming Chrome OS, designed for netbooks - a growing fad in computers. So expect to see a lot more of Chrome in 2010.

Runners-Up: Apple, Facebook

It's been another good year for Apple and its iPhone platform. The iPhone is the leading smartphone in the market and the App Store now features over 100,000 applications. This year, as we mentioned in our Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009 review, Apple extended the SDK with version 3.0 of the iPhone OS. The updates included better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications.

With these kinds of improvements, we expect Apple to continue its success on the mobile Web in 2010 - despite increasing competition from Google's Android platform.

Facebook had a stellar year too, passing the 300 million active user mark in September. It also continued to add features to the site, ranging from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users' news streams.

Facebook's user base is increasingly diverse, and it is now clearly the number one social network in the world, leaving MySpace in its dust. What's more, Facebook's user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

Next Page: Honorable Mentions & Also Rans

Honorable Mentions: Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe

While Microsoft continued to struggle with its Windows Live brand, it did come out with at least one compelling new product in 2009.

Until earlier this year, Google didn't have any serious competition in the search market. But with the launch of Microsoft's Bing in July, users suddenly had a new choice of search engine. Bing bills itself as a "decision engine" and its market share has climbed steadily over the last few months. Microsoft keeps adding interesting new features like visual search, hover previews, integrated Twitter search and a smart integration of some of Wolfram Alpha's most compelling features.

We also recognized Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, among our Top Products of 2009.

Amazon had another good year in 2009. Its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was one of our top 100 products this year. However Amazon had the most impact this year with a piece of hardware: its e-book reader, the Kindle. In May, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, featuring a 9.7-inch display that is about two-and-a-half-times larger than the Kindle 2. November was Amazon's best month ever for Kindle sales, and, according to the company, the Kindle is the "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon."

Very few Web platforms have the cross-platform reach of Adobe AIR. It allows developers to create one application and run it on all of the major operating systems. This year Adobe launched AIR 2, which now allows developers to access mass storage devices, drag-and-drop support for remote files and rudimentary support for P2P networking. In addition, AIR 2 enables developers to use the multi-touch capabilities of modern screens.

Also Rans

Unfortunately, the less said about Yahoo!, AOL, Mozilla, eBay - the better. It hasn't been a great year for any of them.

Yahoo! struggled gamely and impressed us with its YQL (Yahoo Query Language) and SearchMonkey. But it is far from the Internet force it was in 2005, when we named it our Best BigCo. Yahoo still has a wide reach and is very popular amongst mainstream audiences, but it just isn't the force it once was.

AOL has resorted to becoming a content farm in order to compete, eBay has squandered a valuable asset in Skype, and Mozilla - while continuing to innovate - has been hurt by Google's Chrome browser entering the market.

Now let us know your thoughts. Do you think that Google deserves the Best BigCo of 2009?

Ed: Thanks Frederic Lardinois, one of our writers whose year-end posts I liberally quoted from to create this article!

We will announce the final top 10, along with the full results, this Friday. After one day of voting, here is the top 10:

UPDATE: The poll is now closed, CLICK HERE TO SEE RESULTS.

Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below.

Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical

We invite you to vote for your favorite web products of 2009. You can select up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too.

UPDATE: The poll is now closed, CLICK HERE TO SEE RESULTS.

Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below.

Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical

As we noted in last year's round-up, a web platform can be as simple as an API (like Twitter's) that allow external developers to tap into a company's data. It can also be software and services, like Amazon's Web Services. Or it can be a fully fledged development platform, such as iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR. Whatever the case, platforms on the Web allow people to build on top of another company's product, so we think it's an appropriate way to close our Top Web Products series.

Twitter

As Twitter's director of platform, Ryan Sarver, repeatedy pointed out during his presentation at this year's LeWeb that Twitter and its ecosystem of third-party developers have a highly symbiotic relationship. Twitter's APIs are still rate-limited and Twitter won't make the full firehose of feeds available to all of its developers until early 2010. There can be no doubt, however, that Twitter has managed to create one of the most vibrant developer communities around its platform.

Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced a number of new APIs, including a geolocation API that makes it easy to attach geodata to a tweet, and the controversial retweet API. With Twitter Connect, Twitter also released a competitor to Facebook Connect, although this tool hasn't found widespread adoption yet.

Facebook

Just like Twitter, Facebook's success has increasingly become dependent on the third-party ecosystem that has grown up around the Facebook platform. According to Ethan Beard, who manages development of the Facebook Platform, over 500,00 applications have been developed on top of the Facebook platform and over 250 million users use at least one of these.

The Facebook platform is not just about letting users play games like Farmville and or novelty apps like SuperPoke. Facebook Connect, for example, is becoming increasingly popular as a sign-in mechanism on third-party sites. Over 80,000 sites now utilize Facebook Connect, 60 million Facebook users use it and two-thirds of all the sites in the Comscore 100 index currently use it.

WordPress.org

Without any doubt, the world of blogging would look very different today if it wasn't for Automattic's open-source version of WordPress. The core open-source WordPress project is driven by a passionate group of developers, but a majority of development happens in the community that builds plugins for WordPress.

Earlier this year, WordPress released version 2.8 of its self-hosted product - a major overhaul of its core product. It includes a new interface and new options for plugin developers, including the ability to install and search for plugins from within the admin interface. Among some of the most popular WordPress plugins are an image gallery, an SEO tool and an analytics package.

iPhone

We admit that our choice of the iPhone as a top web platform could be somewhat controversial. After all, Apple's less than efficient approval system and the closed nature of the platform have even led some developers to abandon development for the iPhone altogether.

There can be little doubt, however, that Apple has created one of the most successful mobile developer programs. The App Store now features over 100,000 applications and an increasing number of web services now offer versions of their products that are specifically geared towards the iPhone's Safari browser.

This year, Apple extended the SDK with a number of new and improved features when it released version 3.0 of the iPhone OS. These updates include better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications.

Android

Android came of age in 2009. It was still a relatively unknown mobile operating system in the consumers' conscience in 2008, but this year not only saw a large increase in developer activity, but also a strong interest in Android phones like the Motorola Droid.

Thanks to the open-source nature of the project, Android made it easy for developers of augmented reality applications to test their ideas long before Apple offered the necessary APIs on its platform. While the Motorola Droid features Android 2.0 already, most other manufacturers don't offer this update for their customers yet.

Next page: Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009, 6-10

Data.gov

2009 saw a number of interesting developments in the Government 2.0 movement. One of the most high-profile backers of this movement was - surprisingly - the U.S. government. With Data.gov and similar government projects that feature APIs, developers can now find a wealth of information that was previously hard to access.

By providing API access to this data, the U.S. government has opened itself up to more scrutiny, as citizens can now analyze this data with unprecedented ease.

New York Times APIs

No other news organization offers as many APIs as the New York Times - although the Guardian's Open Platform was also a strong candidate for this list. Over the course of this year, the New York Times opened up an API for accessing an archive of all the paper's stories since 1981 and APIs to access information about the U.S. Congress and the New York State legislature.

There can be little doubt that the newspaper industry needs to find new ways to monetize its product. For some papers, this has meant making it harder for consumers and developers to mash up their content. The New York Times, however, has decided that increased openness is a better strategy. [disclosure: RWW syndicates content to NYT]

Google App Engine

With App Engine, Google gives developers an easy way to develop and deploy cloud applications through a comprehensive set of services and APIs. This year, Google introduced Java as an additional language in the App Engine's repertoire. App Engine now also supports XMPP, which has allowed a number of developers to create services that push real-time updated to IM clients or third-party applications.

In addition, Google also announced a pricing structure for App Engine in February.

In November, Google had to face some negative publicity around App Engine when it became known that some hackers were using the service to host a bot net. Overall, however, the service has not suffered from any major security issues so far.

Azure

Azure is Microsoft's big push towards cloud computing. While it is still too early to judge the success of this platform, we think it would be wrong to underestimate Microsoft's commitment to this space and the size of its developer ecosystem. While Amazon and RackSpace's cloud services are clearly more popular than Microsoft's new service, there can be little doubt that the arrival of Microsoft in this market will help to push the incumbents towards more innovation.

Adobe AIR

While Adobe AIR is nowhere near perfect, very few other platforms have the same cross-platform reach as AIR. It allows developers to create one application and distribute it for all the major operating systems. Thanks to its auto-updating features, AIR also makes it easy for developers to keep their install base up to date.

This year, Adobe launched AIR 2, which now allows developers to access mass storage devices, drag-and-drop support for remote files and rudimentary support for P2P networking. In addition, AIR 2 also enables developers to use the multi-touch capabilities of modern screens.

Those are our picks! In the comments let us know your thoughts or what we may have missed.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

Location-based Apps - Foursquare: Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March. Since then it has partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users.

iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire: In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app. Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application.

Real-Time Search - Collecta: If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release, which launched in June. In September the company released its API to developers.

Twitter App Discovery - OneForty: Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store," OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy-to-understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage.

Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10

All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access: Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched its much-anticipated $5-per-month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify.

Web TV - Clicker: Launched in mid November, Clicker is considered the TV Guide for Internet television. The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors.

Semantic Search - Evri: Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections.

Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo: While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July. The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions.

Augmented Reality - Layar: ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June. Created by SPRXmobile, the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July, SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd-party applications.

Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed.

Pubsubhubbub

Real-time PubSubHubbub feeds are already being published by FeedBurner, Blogger, LiveJournal, LiveDoor, Google Alerts, Feedoor and the feed republishing service Superfeedr. Facebook's FriendFeed, LazyFeed and the newest version of Netvibes are consuming Hubbub feeds so far, as are a number of small sites and services that are using the feeds for machine-to-machine communication.

Hubbub consuming applications are reporting server traffic savings of up to 85% and engineers love it.

RSSCloud

RSSCloud is a technology that's been a part of the RSS 2.0 spec for years but got a new burst of development energy this year when creator Dave Winer began working on it in part as a way to create a decentralized Twitter experience.

RSSCloud is similar to Hubbub, is often implemented in conjunction with it but doesn't deliver full content updates with the notification of changes to a feed. The first major move to adopt RSSCloud was by blog publisher WordPress.

The latest addition to the technology is a new feature called CloudPipe, which will enable delivery of real-time feeds to desktop and mobile clients, even behind a firewall.

Creator Dave Winer has been a key figure in an incredible number of the most important technologies of the read/write era of the web. He created the first popular blogging software (Radio Userland), was the first to enable podcast delivery in an RSS feed visa-vi the now standard method of enclosures, he built the web's leading blog ping server (weblogs.com), he ushered RSS into the mainstream, he created the format for sharing bundles of RSS feeds and other outlines (OPML), he wrote the XML-RPC framework (predecessor of SOAP) and the MetaWeblog API for remote blog management.

Now Dave Winer is working on real-time web technology and we'd be fools to not watch what he's doing.

Facebook

Facebook, for all its shortcomings, has turned more than 200 million new people on to real-time streams of content pushed to their browsers in 2009. If you think this paradigm is important, Facebook deserves a medal.

Google Real-Time Search

Twitter search

Whether you're watching brand mentions for your work or participating in a semi-obscene public ritual of riffs on a trending meme - millions of people now regularly watch the real-time updates on Twitter search results pages.

Twitter bought a search engine called Summize in July of 2008, built by a group of former AOL scientists and originally intended to be a sentiment analysis technology. It has become incredibly important this year. When the site's new GeoLocation API gets put to more substantive use, that search engine is going to become all the more important - in ways that could change our day-to-day lives.

Next page: Top 10 Real-Time Technologies of 2009 6-10

Superfeedr

Julien Genestoux's Superfeedr is a service that pulls in content feeds from around the Web and then offers updates for those feeds in XMPP or PubSubHubbub format. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web and in fact just added publisher analytics ala FeedBurner today. Superfeedr is a key enabler for other applications and if you want an interesting view into the nitty gritty of the real-time web, you should go subscribe to the Superfeedr company blog right now.

Genestoux says the companies using his service so far include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed, StatusNet and a number of small services such as Webwag, EventVue, Quub, AppNotifications, Excla.im and SmackSale. That's an impressive list and your company could well be on it by next year.

Tornado

This September, Facebook open-sourced the newly acquired FriendFeed's real-time infrastructure. It's a fast, relatively easy way to add real-time flow to your application and developers around the world are excited about it. We're all about the potential here at ReadWriteWeb and we think Tornado has a lot of it. We hope to see big things from this project next year.

Breaking News Online's iPhone App

It's a simple app but one that will keep you on top of world events around the clock like nothing else. It's a great use of the iPhone's new Push feature, implemented this year.

Aardvark

Cliqset

Those are our picks! Check them out, let us know who we missed and get ready for a coming time when most of the web will be running in real time!

Underlying the Internet of Things are technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification), sensors and smartphones. Now let's look at the 10 products that stood out this year.

Pachube

A small UK startup particularly impressed us this year: Pachube. Pronounced "PATCH-bay," Pachube lets you tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments both physical and virtual. According to founder Usman Haque, Pachube is about "environments" more so than "sensors." In other words, Pachube aims to be responsive to and influence your environment, for example your home.

For more on this innovative company, see ReadWriteWeb's three-part analysis of Pachube:

1. Pachube Adds Real-Time Notifications - More Power to The Internet of Things
2. Applications From The Internet of Things - An Analysis of Pachube
3. Business Models of The Internet of Things - An Analysis of Pachube's Open Source Platform

IBM's sensor solutions

One of the leading big companies in the Internet of Things is IBM, which offers a range of RFID and sensor technology solutions. IBM has been busy working with various manufacturers and goods suppliers this year to introduce those solutions to the world. For example, IBM announced a deal at the end of June with Danish transportation company Container Centralen. By February 2010, Container Centralen will begin using IBM sensor technology to enable companies in the horticultural supply chain to track the progress of shipments as they move from growers to wholesalers and retailers across Europe. It makes the travel process very transparent and data centric.

Arduino

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform made up of open source hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. For an example of the type of internet-connected object you can build with Arduino, check out this presentation where the author configured a child's toy ray gun to react when anyone posted the #barcampliverpool hash tag on Twitter.

Fedex SenseAware

International courier giant Fedex released a new tracking device and web service for packages in December. 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.

HP CeNSE

HP Labs has joined the race to build an infrastructure for the Internet of Things. The giant computing and IT services company recently announced a project that aims to be a "Central Nervous System for the Earth" (CeNSE). It's a research and development program to build a planetwide sensing network, using billions of "tiny, cheap, tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors." The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations.

Next page: Top Internet of Things Products 6-10

Japan's Suica Card and Hong Kong's Octopus Card

Earlier this year we looked at three of the world's leading RFID-powered Smart Cards: Japan's cutting edge Suica Card, London's Oyster Card and Hong Kong's long-running Octopus Card. In Japan and Hong Kong, the cards (and other devices, such as phones and watches) may be used to purchase goods from selected shops.

It's more pervasive in Hong Kong, where the Octopus can be used at more than 1,000 merchants. Furthermore, in Hong Kong the card can be used as an access device for places like apartment buildings and schools.

Mir:ror

Mir:ror is a device from French company Violet that detects the objects you show it and gives them powers. As you wave a device over the USB-attached mirror, you can trigger applications and multimedia content automatically. The "magic" mirror isn't actually sensing the object itself, but is reacting to an RFID tag placed on the object which then tells your computer what to do.

Those tags are embedded in the company's Ztamps, colorful RFID stamps that you stick on the objects you want to connect. They also work with the company's other more well-known internet-connected object: the Nabaztag, an adorable rabbit that can deliver anything from ambient information through lights and sounds to verbal information - like when he reads your email or RSS feeds to you.

Unfortunately, in August Violet filed for bankruptcy. However, in October it was saved by videogame publisher Mindscape.

WideNoise

The iPhone is a fertile ground for Internet of Things, as a product called WideNoise shows. WideNoise is an iPhone application that samples decibel noise levels, displaying them on an interactive map.

With the app you can take a sound reading, and if you so wish share that with the WideNoise community. You can check the average sound level of the area around you, which might be handy if you're house-hunting or simply looking for a quiet spot to relax in.

ioBridge

ioBridge is a web platform for remote control and monitoring, which bills itself (with tongue in cheek) as "one step closer to Skynet." It's a company based in Gainesville, Florida, born because the founders saw "a demand for interfacing real world devices with the web." Their first beta release was in November 2008 and since then the company has been busy building out its product line and watching what developers like Matt Morey do with them.

Morey, who by day is an engineer for Texas Instruments, has developed a two-way, home automation application using Twitter and ioBridge.

Citysense

Sense Networks is a company aiming to index the real world "using real-time and historical location data for predictive analytics across multiple industries." It has a platform called Macrosense that "receives streaming location data in real-time, analyzes and processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and stores it in a way that can be easily queried to better understand aggregate human activity."

The company has so far built one consumer product on top of this platform: Citysense, an iPhone and Blackberry app that allows people in San Francisco to see the most-happening nightlife in real time. Citysense currently accesses cell-phone and taxi GPS data from about four million GPS sensors, to see where the local hot spots are. It then links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at popular locations.

Those are our picks for the top 10 Internet of Things applications of 2009. Let us know your thoughts.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

This is one case where the hype was as noisy as the app - and both were deafening. We have to hand it to Google's publicity team; we don't know one geek who wasn't positively salivating for a Wave invite. The ReadWriteWeb back channel was a complete melee when the first invites were rolled out to team members. But once we got there and saw the new tech tricks, like watching one another type, we started thinking about use cases. And the more we struggled to understand and use this product, the more frustrated and bored we became. Blame it on the steep learning curve. Blame it on our misunderstanding the product. Mount whatever feeble defense you like, but techies know Wave was a flop.

The TabletPads Went to the Deadpool

All we wanted was a $200-500 flat piece of glass and plastic with some fancy gizmodgery inside so we could look at the Internet from the comfort of our couches. And what did we get? Rumors, Photoshopped gadget porn, promises - lies, all lies. We'd have been better off if we'd spent those months drawing the Yahoo! home page on an Etch-A-Sketch. Although the Crunchpad has resurfaced as the JooJoo, the price has been marked up considerably, and the whole project just seems wrong to us now. Moreover, five will get you ten that Michael Arrington, father of the Crunchpad and a former attorney, is fixing to get litigious right about now, which might significantly delay the product's appearance on the market.

Powerset Resurfaced as Bing

In 2008, Powerset was one of the stealthiest, sexiest startups on the Silicon Valley block. About five minutes after launching, Powerset got snatched up by Microsoft to the tune of $100 million. When everyone had retrieved their dentures from the ground and changed their pants, they noticed that Powerset's ever-so-sexy tech had been folded quietly into the Borg for assimilation. And about a year later, Bing was born, reportedly from the tech that Microsoft scraped off the infant carcass of Powerset. And Bing sucked. We had such high hopes.

Twitter Failed to Innovate

While some of us had our money on a Twitter sale in 2009, others were simply waiting for the company to debut a radical, interesting, mutually beneficial revenue model. At the very least, most users were hoping that the scalability issues and downtime that made Twitter the tragic heroine of 2008 would be put to rest.

Twitter's failures this year were less about the headlines they made than the ones they didn't make. Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, Twitter didn't capitalize on their massive adoption increase (a.k.a., their Oprahtization) and sell. Worse yet, they didn't buy. When one recalls the purchase of Summize and then contrasts it with this year's explosion of excellent Twitter apps, one wonders why none of these small startups or one-off side projects were acquired. Perhaps this was a case of "Hey, we can do that!" as Twitter certainly seemed intent on pilfering features (such as lists and retweets) from third-party developers. Too bad the "official" Twitter features suck a lot more than the original third-party designs.

But worst of all, we are still consistently experiencing downtime at a level that is unacceptable for any major web app. Google couldn't get away with this kind of failure; why should Twitter be allowed to do so?

The Great Firewall of China Drama Continued and Worsened

To date, China's "Golden Shield Project" restrictions on Internet use are throttling traffic from that country to websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Bing, and many, many more. Banned sites include news organizations that cover controversial events, pro-democracy sites and blogs, any site acknowledging the existence of Taiwan, YouTube, most blogging websites (Wordpress, Blogger, etc.) and anything the government deems to be obscene or profane. In countries where creative self expression and the ability to browse, learn and make decisions independently are freedoms too often taken for granted, these restrictions are indeed unthinkable. The project began in 1998 and still made plenty of headlines this year for its renewed affronts to freedom on the Internet. For example, in June, the Chinese government announced it would be rolling out censorship software on every new computer sold in the country.

Microsoft Dumped Don Dodge

Not too long ago, we at ReadWriteWeb were shocked to learn from startup guru and longtime Microsoft ambassador Don Dodge that the Big M had given him the kiss-off. Dodge was seen by many as an intelligent, approachable personality in front of a huge, out-of-touch, unpopular brand. It was the tech industry equivalent of FOX cancelling the Simpsons. It's been noted that Microsoft makes its paper from the enterprise, not startups, which would make Dodge a natural candidate for the chopping block. Still, the move was hugely criticized by bloggers, VCs and others. Microsoft's PR plot thickened a few days later when Google snatched up the briefly unemployed Dodge.

Spotify Didn't Launch in the US... Yet

It tops our list of Most Highly Anticipated Products Yankees Can't Get Their Mitts On. Streaming music service Spotify is changing the world - with the exception of the United States. We've already got a crowded market of players here, including Pandora, Last.fm and Imeem. Call us greedy, but we want the new hotness that is Spotify, too.

The Web 1.0 Comeback Campaigns Were Embarrassing to Watch

Now, we at ReadWriteWeb have no desire to kick a company when it's down, but a couple of the mastodons of the mid-nineties dotcom boom have been valiantly attempting to stage comebacks, some more successfully than others. Yahoo! did some good things for developers this year, but AOL/Aol's rebranding was pitiful. And don't get Dana Oshiro started on the affront to end-user dignity that is Friendster.

Oracle Acquired MySQL

Open-source geeks have been sporting metaphorical black armbands for the loss of MySQL, the world's largest open-source database, to Oracle, the largest pay-to-play database, following that company's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. We reported last week that MySQL usage is expected to drop by around 10 percent over the next 5 years. Here's another handy stat: Oracle also this year raised their own prices by 40 percent. Will MySQL remain free-as-in-beer and open source? Or will it succumb to corporate lameness?

And the Worst Fail of 2009... LeapFish Made a God-Awful Promotional Video

Tonight, we dine in hell! LeapFish's bombastic promo clip (which you have to watch in 10-second segments to avoid waves of misplaced inspiration alternating with waves of nausea) is as horrifying as the company itself is sketchy. The startup says it made $10 million before it even launched, and the CEO Ben Behrouzi is an infamous contrepreneur with a background in lead generation and threatening employees.

So, there you have it: our list of the worst tech-related disasters of 2009. What did we omit? Let us know in the comments below, and don't hold back. Clearly, we didn't.

And to the companies mentioned in this report: 2009 isn't over yet. You've still got three weeks to make it right with end users.