ReadWriteWeb

Every year ReadWriteWeb selects the top 10 products or developments across a range of categories. We kick off the 2010 'Best Of' series with our selection of the top 10 Semantic Web products and implementations of the year.

This year we've chosen 5 products by semantically charged startups and 5 implementations by large organizations. The startups represent the cutting edge of Semantic Web. Each has made an impact on the Internet this year, with user growth and innovation. The organizations we've selected - which include Facebook, Google and the BBC - offered the best examples of large scale deployment of semantic technology.

"RSS is Dead", tech sage Steve Gillmor said in May of 2009. I know that's not true, because I spend a lot of my work and my leisure time reading RSS and other forms of syndicated content feeds.

If you're not familiar with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) - it is, in the simplest of terms, a powerfully simple technology that delivers new content from multiple websites to one single place you've subscribed to RSS feeds from. RSS has not changed the world in the ways its early adherents hoped it would, but it continues to change dramatically the lives of some of us unafraid to play around with it a little. Below are the 10 most exciting RSS and syndication technologies of the past year.

At the end of every year, ReadWriteWeb reviews the progress (or otherwise) of big Internet organizations and names one of them our 'Best BigCo.' We started this tradition in 2004, making this the 7th year. In 2009 it was Google, thanks to Chrome, Android and other advancements. In 2008 we chose Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006, Yahoo! in 2005, and Google got the inaugural honor in 2004.

We first honored Facebook with Best BigCo in 2007, due to the launch that year of its development platform. Over 2010, Facebook has gone to a whole other level. It experienced astounding user growth and shut out all competition as an all-purpose social network. For this reason, Facebook is ReadWriteWeb's Best BigCo of 2010.

The Mobile Web has been a huge trend in 2010 and one output of that has been the emergence of app stores. It started of course with Apple's App Store for the iPhone and then iPad. Then we saw other app stores come onto the scene: Android Market, Nokia's Ovi Store, Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace and others.

In addition to these OS-based app stores, there are independent outlets catering to multiple types of OS (like GetJar), carrier app stores, device app stores, tablet app stores and retailer app stores like Amazon's forthcoming Android one. So it's been a very busy field! Let's take a look at some of the highlights of 2010.

Yesterday we selected our Best LittleCo of 2010, the light blogging service Tumblr. In this post we select a company that we think has the potential to be Best LittleCo of 2011. Next year we're expecting a lot from data-centric companies and one in particular. This company provides a platform for developers to create location-aware applications: SimpleGeo.

This is the 7th year that we've chosen a Most Promising company. Looking back at our results, we've hit the mark sometimes: for example, Feedburner in 2004 and Digg in 2005. Other times our picks have been accurate on the trends, but flew wide of the dartboard when it came to picking the successful companies. We chose sync app Sharpcast (now SugarSync) in 2006, but DropBox is better known now. We chose Brightkite in 2008, which ultimately lost out to Foursquare in the battle of the check-in apps. However, we think we have a winner here in SimpleGeo!

Looking back on the year in Web technology, we can see that several product categories have evolved significantly over 2010. We've already written about App Stores and eReaders. Another market that progressed in 2010 was Internet TV. Among the developments: Apple announced a major overhaul of Apple TV, Google launched its Android-powered Google TV platform and partnered with Sony, Boxee and Roku continued to improve their set-top box products, startups like Clicker innovated new types of web services for Internet TV, and content platforms like Hulu captured more viewers.

In this post we review the Internet TV market over 2010 and highlight the big stories of the year.

2010 was a good year for Web startups. Deal flow, particularly at early stages, was active, and even though valuations were high, investor dollars were seemingly at the ready. Of the companies that made headlines and that led some of the major tech trends of the year, many were startups: Zynga (social gaming), Groupon (group buying), Foursquare (location-based networks), Tumblr (micro-blogging), and GetGlue (semantic Web), to name a few.

In pulling together our list of the Top 10 Startups of 2010 for ReadWriteWeb's "Best of" series, we've decided to look beyond some of those big names and "established" startups (the term gets applied so broadly). Rather than lumping together new companies no matter their age or size, no matter whether they have an acquisition offer by Google or have a Hollywood biopic about their founder, we've decided to restrict our list to those startups who were founded or who launched in 2010.

The rise of Facebook as a truly mainstream social network was a big story this year. An interesting question is, how much of Facebook's success was directly related to its loosening of privacy controls at the end of 2009? That move created both a backlash and a huge bump in users as 2010 unfolded.

The issue of privacy has come to the fore again this month, with the swirling controversy around WikiLeaks and previously secret government cables. From Facebook to WikiLeaks, Google Street View to an app called I Can Stalk U, 2010 has been a tumultuous year in online data privacy. Let's look back at some of the major privacy stories of the year.

eBook sales almost doubled over 2010 and now make up 9% of total consumer book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. This growth was fueled by intense competition amongst eReader manufacturers over 2010. Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook and others attempted to undercut each other throughout the year. Further, the iPad arrived in 2010 and added to the choices for eBook consumers.

eBooks started to take off in 2009, but in 2010 things really heated up. Speaking as a consumer who has just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's nearly 600-page novel Freedom on my iPad's Kindle app, I can attest that eBooks are here to stay! Let's look back then at a busy year in the eReader and eBook market.

Mobile technology has seen major advances over the course of 2010, with new platforms, new services and new usage trends all taking hold to spread the adoption of not just the mobile Web, but the Web itself. The number of smartphone owners are increasing, mobile operating systems are proliferating and apps have become the new go-to tools for accessing mobile content on the go.

When you look back at the past 12 months, it's almost hard to narrow a list down to only 10 top products, in fact - there's so much innovation happening around mobile today. But we think the list below stands out as representative of the most important products from the year.