In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we're announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising 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. 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:
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.
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
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In one of ReadWriteWeb's longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we're announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we'll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company.