Thanks to the new Twitter feature, which will put all of the links you share on Twitter into a drop box on Pearltrees, you can now easily create a complete archive of all the content you share. You still have to organize this content yourself, however. Pearltrees does not feature auto-tagging.

Also Coming This Week: Real-Time Updates

Starting on Wednesday, Pearltrees will not just allow you to import links from Twitter, but the service will also be able to send out alerts to your Twitter friends when you update your own pearls.

In addition, the company will also introduce a new search feature and updates from other users you follow will be updated in real time. It's important to note that Pearltrees' focus is less on following other users. Instead, Lamothe stressed, the real value of the service is in following the content that others users create on the service.

API Coming Soon

Early next year, the company will introduce an API that will allow developers to access bookmarks and import and export data from other services. The details of this API are still in flux, but will likely allow developers to easily connect other social networks to the service as well.

Strategies

Some teams have developed iPhone apps (iTunes link), while others are going to scour Twitter for clues. Some teams are also taking a more traditional approach and plan to simply drive around hoping to spot the balloons - and hoping their team will be large enough to find them. Click here for a list of teams; most of them are still more than happy to accept new volunteers. Even if you don't belong to a group, you can still send out a tweet with the GPS coordinates if you happen to come across a balloon by coincidence. The teams will surely be grateful for this information as well.

DARPA is financing this challenge because it hopes that this event, just like earlier DARPA challenges, will foster fresh thinking and encourage technologists to discover "new, collaborative ways to approach problems that were not dreamt of 40 years ago."

Why Did Wolfram Kill the Mobile Landing Page?

In our conversation, Schoeller Porter pointed out that this landing page was only meant to be a test, and traffic to the site had decreased to the point where the company simply decided to pull the plug.

It's not surprising that Porter would defend Wolfram's decision to shut down the mobile site as a traffic issue, and not as a ploy to sell more of the company's pricey mobile app. According to Porter, users can still choose to get a good mobile experience through the website and those users who need a mobile experience can always get the mobile app. Until now, though, the mobile landing page offered a happy medium between the regular desktop website and the mobile app.

Currently, the team wants to focus on enhancing the experience on the default website and the mobile app; Wolfram is also thinking about mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry.

Why Not Just Keep the Mobile Site Up?

One could argue, however, that it really wouldn't have cost Wolfram a lot of money or manpower to keep the mobile landing page up for the time being. The company also didn't help itself by killing the mobile site without any explanation on its blog. The fact that the mobile site now features a big add for the iPhone app only helped to fuel the speculation about Wolfram's intentions.

Mobile Roadie Powers the Official LeWeb 09 iPhone App

In addition to the Ustream partnership, Mobile Roadie also announced that it will power the official LeWeb 09 application (iTunes link). This annual conference in Paris will kick off next Wednesday. The push-enabled LeWeb app will feature live streaming video, an updated conference schedule and maps. The app also includes a list of conference speakers and attendees, as well as a chat room and a Twitter aggregator for LeWeb related tweets. Users will also be able to use the app to post their own photos from conference sessions.

The following video gives you a good impression of what the app is capable of:

RWW at LeWeb

ReadWriteWeb will be out in full force at this year's LeWeb. I will cover the conference as part of the Traveling Geeks team and Dana Oshiro will be there with the Social Media Club House.

This experiment was designed to allow users to access videos as quickly as possible. The new watch pages were engineered to keep latency at a minimum. Feather turns off most of the AJAX features on YouTube. Because of this, you can't comment on videos, see stats, flag a video or share it.  On a fast broadband connection, the difference between loading speeds is barely noticeable. Users with slow Internet connections, however, will surely benefit from this experiment.

As far as we can see, the video player itself hasn't changed, and to see the Muppets perform Bohemian Rhapsody in 1080p, you will still need a pretty fast connection.

For now, Feather will only work on a select number of YouTube videos, though Google will likely expand this experiment if it turns out to be successful.

To join this experiment, just head to this page. You can use the same page to leave the experiment later.

After SPDY (which augments HTTP), this is Google's second major project that touches upon the core infrastructure of the Web.

Using Google Public DNS

Google Public DNS uses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as its IP addresses. Advanced users will surely have no problem making the necessary changes to enable Google Public DNS. The company has also released a set of step-by-step instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux users that can be found here.

A First for Google: Phone Support for a Free Product

In addition, Google is also offering phone support, which, to our knowledge, is unprecedented. Given that a mistake in changing your DNS settings could easily make accessing the Internet impossible, this is probably a good solution in this specific case.

Privacy

According to Google's FAQ, the company will only keep temporary logs and erase all the information it collects through the public DNS service within 24 to 45 hours. The company promises not to keep any information that is linked to IP addresses in its permanent logs.

As of now, it doesn't look like Google offers any additional services besides the pure DNS lookup. Unlike OpenDNS, it doesn't block malware sites or present users with a list of alternative addresses (and ads) if it can't resolve an address.

Are Real Merchants Looking for an Alternative?

According to Kleitsch, established businesses "are not looking for Jack's solution." A regular coffee shop can get a payment terminal for free and only pays about $20 in fees per month (plus a percentage of every transaction). Kleitsch argues that the customer that is most likely to use Square's system is somebody who makes jewelry at home and sells it at a local Christmas bazaar. The question is if this is a large enough market for Square.

Traditional credit card processors are also able to settle accounts daily. It remains to be seen if Square will offer a similar service.

Potential for Fraud

Square will also have to deal with potential fraud. While we don't know the exact details about how Square will operate, chances are that the company will have to keep a large reserve in an escrow account with the credit card processing companies that power Square's back-end. Anybody who sits on a pile of stolen credit cards, Kleitsch pointed out, could use Square to run up charges on these accounts. Once the defrauded credit card owners dispute these charges, Square could be left with a large bill to pay.

Merchants with a chargeback rate of more than 2% are typically turned down by credit card processing companies. If Kleitsch is right, these would be exactly the kind of merchants who would be interested in using Square's payment system.

Too Risky?

Obviously, the company's investors and advisors don't think this business model is too risky. There can also be little doubt that consumers could benefit from a new company that disrupts the current status quo in the credit card processing world.

Do you think Kleisch's argument that Square will attract the wrong kind of customers holds true? Or do you think Square will revolutionize the market and finally give small companies the ability to do business on a level playing field?

The app feels somewhat similar to the paid Times Reader application - especially if you use an application like Fluid or Prism to pack it into a standalone app.

One nice feature of the app is that it smartly rearranges stories according to the size of the browser window. Times Skimmer also features keyboard shortcuts.

Times Skimmer features a separate section for blogs, as well as a section for collections of articles about special topics, e.g. swine flu, credit crisis and bacon. According to Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising officer at the New York Times Media Group and general manager of NYTimes.com, Times Skimmer is meant to give "online readers another way to view the latest news and updates in a choice of formats that best suit their preferences."

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb has an existing syndication arrangement with The New York Times.

Competing with the Real-Time Web

As our own Sarah Perez pointed out earlier this year, a full read/write API would allow Digg to compete with the real-time Web. To do this, Digg doesn't really need to enable users to submit stories remotely. What Digg really needs is a way to get more users to vote for stories more often.

Currently, it can take hours - and sometimes days - before a story appears on Digg, while services like Tweetmeme can pick up trends and breaking news stories on Twitter within minutes. To pick up speed, Digg needs to get its voting mechanism into more places - and the new API would allow the company to do just that.

Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.

Bing

Until earlier this year, Google didn't have any serious competition in the search market. Now, however, thanks to Microsoft's Bing - which launched in July - users finally have a choice when it comes to search engines. Bing's market share climbed steadily over the last few months, and 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.

Bing, which bills itself as a "decision engine," tries to give its users more than just 10 links. Instead, Bing focuses on giving users answers right on the search results page. A search for a football or baseball player, for example, will bring up recent stats, while a search for flights brings up data from Microsoft's Bing Travel service.

Wolfram Alpha

No other new web service was greeted with the same amount of hype as Wolfram Alpha this year. 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. If this sounds familiar, it might be because Microsoft's Bing is trying to do something very similar - even if Microsoft's approach isn't quite as radical. Because of these similarities, it also doesn't come as a surprise that Bing was the first search engine to integrate search results from Wolfram Alpha.

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, though not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. We still have to wait and see what the future holds for Wolfram Alpha.

For now, the service is a great experiment and even if it fails (which we don't think it will), its influence will surely extend to other search engines like Bing and Google Search. In the spirit of trying something different, Wolfram 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.

Google Chrome

Google launched the first beta version of Google Chrome in late 2008. Even though Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn't offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, Chrome has already changed the browser market. Chrome's relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and even Microsoft now compares the performance of the next version of Internet Explorer to Chrome. Thanks to its fast JavaScript rendering engine and interesting new technologies, Chrome is changing the way developers are thinking about browsers. Even if you don't use Chrome, you will see Chrome's influence in the upcoming versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Chrome, of course, is also the basis for Google's upcoming Chrome OS, so chances are that we will see a lot more of Chrome in the next year.

Posterous

Whether you want to open up a new blog without any fuzz or just share photos and messages easily on multiple services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, light blogging service Posterous has you covered. The service launched in May 2009 and was definitely one of the most interesting new arrivals in the blogging landscape this year. What makes Posterous stand out is its ability to cross-post updates to other services (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, for example). In addition, it's also extremely easy to set up a new blog. Just email a message, photo or video to post AT posterous.com and your new blog is ready to go. Advanced users can also port their own domain names to the service and theme their blogs.

With PicPosterous, the company now also offers an easy to use iPhone app.

Hulu

Thanks to its prominent ads during the Super Bowl, Hulu became a household name in the US this year. Even before this publicity campaign, however, Hulu had already established itself as a the #1 destination for finding episodes of TV shows online. Hulu started out as a joint venture between FOX, NBC and other TV networks. In April, ABC also joined this group. Thanks to this, Hulu now offers one of the only destinations to easily find TV shows online in the US. While Hulu is currently available for free, it's worth noting that Hulu could start charging for subscriptions as early as next year.

Next page: Consumer web apps 6-10

TweetDeck

Except for Twitter's own website, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client. While a few of us here at RWW prefer Seesmic's Twitter application, there can be no doubt that TweetDeck has set the standard for Twitter clients this year. TweetDeck was the first client to popularize a column-based layout - a design feature that a lot of other Twitter clients now use as well.

In its current version (our review), TweetDeck introduced support for Twitter's new lists feature, as well as integration with LinkedIn and partial support for Twitter's new geolocation feature. TweetDeck was also one of the first clients to introduce local lists, a feature that many power users had been clamoring for long before Twitter introduced its own version of this functionality.

Twitter

No Top 10 list of web applications would be complete without mentioning Twitter. No other web service (except for maybe Facebook) has recently managed to capture our imagination to the degree that Twitter has. Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced numerous new features, including lists and integrated search. Twitter's users didn't greet every new feature with complete happiness, however. The new retweet feature, for example, was met with resistance and it's still not clear if it will win out over today's retweet convention that grew organically over the last few years.

Today, there are numerous users on Twitter with more than 1 million followers, and services like BNO News regularly break news reports on Twitter long before the mainstream media. While Twitter has its detractors, there can be little doubt that 2009 was the year when Twitter came of age.

Aardvark

Have you ever found yourself in a city you've never been to and wondered where to find a good place for lunch or dinner or just playing pool? You could go to Yelp or Citysearch, but the best suggestions are likely to come from your own personal network and the friends of your friends. Aardvark makes it possible to harvest this collective knowledge of your extended social network through an easy to use web app, instant messaging bot and iPhone app. Simply ask a question and Aardvark will route your query to one of your friends (or your friend's friends) who is currently online. Thanks to sophisticated machine learning algorithms that run in the background, Aardvark quickly learns who to ask about specific topics.

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. While we had our doubts about how well this would work when the service first launched, Aardvark has proven it's worth time and again. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered.

Google Voice

Google loves to enter markets where the status quo prevails and turn things on their head. With Google Voice, the search giant is doing just that to the telecom and VoIP industry. Google Voice assigns every user a new phone number that can be forwarded to any phone. Google Voice, which features a Gmail-like user interface, allows its users to make free local and long distance call, as well as cheap international calls from their existing phones. The service also features free text messages, conference calls and automated voicemail transcriptions.

While other services like Ribbit Mobile and VoxOx offer similar features, Google Voice has the name recognition and marketing power behind it to make it an even more important product in the coming year. For now, Google Voice is still an invite-only service, though Google continually sends out additional invites.

Facebook

Over the course of 2009, Facebook continued to grow and added new features which ranged from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users news streams. While it still trailed MySpace in 2009, it became the #1 social network this year, and by September Facebook had passed the 300 million active user mark. The service's user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

While Facebook was once the domain of early adopters, today's Facebook population is highly diverse. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook today is users over 35.

Did We Miss Your Favorites?

This list showcases some of the favorite consumer web apps of the RWW team. What are your favorites? What web services do you think made the biggest impact in 2009? Let us know in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009:

According to the information on Square's website, users won't have to sign any contracts and there won't be any monthly fees or hidden costs. Square is currently only working with a select group of companies but plans to expand widely in 2010. In its current iteration, Square works on the iPhone and iPod touch. It's not clear how much the dongle will cost, but chances are that it will be cheap, as the company plans to focus on the service and not the hardware.

Disrupting the Credit Card Processing Business

Credit card processors (the people behind the card swiping machines at your local coffee shop, restaurant or corner store) typically take a hefty cut from every transaction and charge monthly fees.

Square want to be a cheaper, more modern alternative to these systems. Square will email receipts to a payer's phone, for example, and allow merchants to track frequent customers and offer them discounts. In addition, Square will also donate one penny for every transaction to a cause of the user's choice.

Thanks to Square, every stand at a local farmers' market and every small coffee cart or hot dog vendor on the street will soon be able to accept credit cards without having to go through one of the major credit card processing services.

Competition

It's worth noting that other services like ePAY and Obopay also offer solutions that allow anybody to accept credit cards, though Square's service looks to be far more elegant than any of the current solutions we have seen.

See the next page for additional screenshots

The Square dongle

Here are Google's and Bing's lists of top search queries of 2009:

Some of these are pretty straightforward (Twitter, Michael Jackson, Facebook), while others, like 'torpedo gratis' (which refers to a free SMS service) and 'tuenti' left us slightly puzzled at first. It is also interesting to note that a lot of these search terms in Google's list are basically just URLs (Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, dantri.com.vn).

Sanitized Lists

It's important to note that Bing's list was mostly scrubbed of obvious URL searches, so a direct comparison between Bing and Google is sadly impossible. Neither Google, Bing or Yahoo made lists of their actual top queries available this year. All we got so far are highly sanitized lists of "trending topics." While these reflect the current mood, they don't really give us a good idea of what people search for on a day-to-day basis.

Your Personal Top 10 in Google's Web History

If you have Google Web History feature turned on, you can find a list of your personal top queries of 2009 here.

Ask.com

Ask.com also just published its top questions of 2009 - though questions like "What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?" make us wonder about the validity of this list.

1. How much should I weigh?
2. How do I get out of debt fast?
3. How do I get pregnant?
4. What is Twitter?
5. What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?
6. What is the meaning of life?
7. When will the world end?
8. How long does marijuana stay in your system?
9. What are the symptoms of Swine Flu?
10. What time is it?

FlockDraw offers a simple set of basic tools: freehand drawing, lines, eraser and text. You can also change the color and size of your font or pencil. There are no fancy tools here, but what is there is more than enough to draw a quick sketch. It's important to note that these FlockDraw rooms are meant to be disposable — once the last person leaves the room, the image disappears.

Two features — embedding the whiteboard and saving files — are currently disabled, though Blake tells us that they will soon return. Users will be able to save files as JPEGs, and embed the whiteboard on their social networking sites or blogs.

Overall, the service, which was founded by Dan Blake (of TinyChat fame) and Ryan Hileman, is extremely easy to use. Just head to the front page and click "Start Drawing." You can also start a new FlockDraw room by simply appending more than 3 characters to the FlockDraw URL (http://flockdraw.com/rwwwhiteboard, for example).

All of this added functionality could have cluttered up TweetDeck's interface, but the team decided to redesign parts of the interface. A single '+' button at the top of the app now opens up a new dialog that allows you to add lists and Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn columns to your view. From there, you can also start new Twitter lists.

TweetDeck's Ian Dodsworth also told us that TweetDeck will soon be able to show its users composite profiles of TweetDeck users based on the social network profiles they have added to TweetDeck.

Auto-Updated Lists

As Twitter still restricts the number of calls a user can make to the Twitter API, TweetDeck's competitor Seesmic decided to have users update lists manually. In TweetDeck, lists will update automatically and you can set the frequency of these updates in the app's settings dialog.

TweetDeck also makes it easy to start new lists from existing lists, which is great if you want to extend somebody else's list with your own picks, for example. TweetDeck will also suggest users for a list. We are not quite sure how TweetDeck makes these suggestions, but they seem to be based on the title of your group.

You can find a full lists of all the tweaks and new features in TweetDeck 0.32 here.

Battle of the Twitter Clients

The auto-updating lists currently give TweetDeck a slight lead over Seesmic, which introduced lists as a core feature of its desktop client a few weeks ago. Seesmic's new Seesmic for Windows, however, can now be extended with Firefox-like plugins. Because of this, Seesmic can now farm out a lot of development to third-party developers, and anybody can create a column for LinkedIn or any other social network.

According to social media monitoring service Sysomos, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client after Twitter's own website. It took TweetDeck a while to release today's updates and the company surely lost some users to Seesmic in the meantime. This new update brings TweetDeck back on par with the competition, and even adds a number of new features — like the ability to clone lists — that its competitors don't offer (yet).

We haven't heard any numbers from Sony yet, but chances are that the Sony Reader Pocket and Touch editions are also doing quite well.