In what's become an annual tradition, over December ReadWriteWeb will present our 'best of' posts for 2009. These are a series of articles that will examine the top web products in categories ranging from consumer web apps to RSS and syndication platforms. Today, we're kicking 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.
Amazon just announced that November was its best month ever for Kindle sales. This excludes sales from today's so-called Cyber Monday. According to Amazon, the $259 Kindle is the "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon." Barnes & Noble is also seeing strong demand for its new nook e-reader, but is unable to fulfill current orders before Christmas. The company has also delayed shipments to its stores until December 7.
Originally set to launch in "early December," Twidroid surprised us by launching the next version of the popular Android Twitter client here on the last day of November instead. Twidroid 3.0, which is now available in the Android Marketplace, is a major update for this mobile application, introducing new features like geolocation, in-app image previews, threaded conversations, and, most notably an extensible plugin platform.
We've discovered an adorable yet highly useful little product that could significantly ease some pain and lead to greater levels of productivity for smartphone developers.
It's ridiculously simple as a concept, yet it allows for more creativity, freedom, and portability than any other tool we've seen for mobile developers, hands down. The product of a design shop and a web development lab, both based in Australia, these nifty and inexpensive toys have been popping up in offices all over Silicon Valley. Read on to learn the secret behind your favorite mobile dev's favorite Christmas present.
As we reported Thanksgiving Day, web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.
However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion's share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy - and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.
In a recent post on Twitter's new geolocation feature and the kinds of apps it would allow developers to create, we received a comment from Bob Hitching telling us to check out GeoMeme.
GeoMeme is Hitching's side project, a real-time web app and also a location-aware mobile web app for iPhone and Android phones. It allows users to see and compare trends in specific locations; for example, you could see the most tweeted-about musicians performing at an award show or the most-tweeted political buzzwords in a given state or town.
After recent comScore data showed Twitter stats leveling off as WordPress traffic continued to grow, some bloggers framed the results as an either/or proposition; if one platforms wins, the other loses.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has weighed in on the subject, stating that the interaction between microblogging and what he's calling "megablogging" is hardly a zero-sum game. "It's not really a 'versus,' it's an 'and'," he wrote.
It has been a few weeks since the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit. Workshops ran the gamut of real-time Web applications and services. They addressed the impact of the real-time Web on search, feeds, aggregation and even branding and marketing. But several topics and terms were not discussed as much as one might have expected: "social," "interaction," and "communication." Perhaps they were assumed. But their absence from discussion spoke of something bigger; namely, our tendency to still view Web content, even real-time content, as information.
A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn's somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. ("I vomited on their shoes at the office party" isn't on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn's categories.
You'll find them below... but they're only a starting point. Kindly add yours in the comments, and maybe - just maybe - they'll be coming soon to a form field near you.
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