Today, at the South By South West festival in Austin, the company has announced the release of a mobile version of its application.

"You can see the queue, you can jump to anywhere in the queue, when a song comes on the library, you can save it," said David Hyman, CEO of MOG, at today's unveiling. "When you listen to Bob Marley radio, it's not Bob Marley inspired radio. You get Bob Marley 24/7."

Today's launch brings this sort of on-demand music delivery to your smartphone. MOG will be launching for Android and iPhone early in the second quarter of 2010. Users will get full access to 7 million tracks on demand, the ability to download music to the phone, MOG radio, 64 ACC+ audio quality with higher quality available by download, for $10 a month.

The demo of the mobile app for Android showed a responsive, full-featured application that allows users to browse through artist discographies, with the ability to add entire albums to the playlist and voice search functionality.

Looking at the iPhone app, we saw a search based app that gives users the ability to play by album, song, playlist or artist radio. An interesting service we've only seen with MOG was the slider, which allows the user to give a variable on how they would like MOG radio to work, whether focusing solely on the chosen artist, on similar artists, or somewhere in between. The user can also switch over to look at the album a particular track comes from, play that album and even chose other songs from that album.

The app is not yet available for download on the iPhone and Hyman said that similar services have not had a problem so far. He guaranteed that there would be no problem for the Android, but couldn't say the same for iPhone.

There is a bit of buzz in the crowd here at SXSW that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will be announcing the similar music service's arrival on U.S. shores when he speaks tomorrow at the keynote speech. We also spoke with Michelle Fields, a marketer with Napster.com, who said that a Napster mobile application was also on the way. Napster offers nearly 9 million songs to its users.

"We have a very strong mobile strategy and a mobile application will be unveiled soon," said Fields.

While we long ago swore off CDs and moved over to the likes of Last.fm and Pandora, this sort of music portability might actually bring us back into the land of the paid consumer. What do you say? Will you shell out 10 clams a month to carry around more music than you've probably ever owned in your pocket?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you've seen long after they've ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

"The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there - it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought," said Doshi. "We built SuperGlued to be that place."

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn't there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

While Pandora "has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties," according to the Times' profile, a recent move by Warner Music may help to put one Internet radio station above the rest.

As Tom Conrad, CTO for Pandora, told us last month when Warner announced it would pull all of its licensed content from streaming music services, "Pandora operates under a different licensing structure and won't be impacted by Warner's apparent decision with respect to free, on-demand services." This could be huge in keeping Pandora on track to break $100 million in revenue this year, as predicted by William Blair, a digital media analyst, in the Times article.

The Times compares Pandora with other services, such as Slacker Radio, noting that Pandora has one third as many songs but three times as many listeners. We can't help but wonder if the absence of Warner's discography might further imbalance this scenario in Pandora's favor.

Update: Slacker Radio has informed us that they too will carry Warner Music titles. This is from a note from a member of Slacker Radio's PR team:

Slacker has and has had since day 1 voluntary licenses with all major labels and 100's of Indie labels. Slacker negotiated deals and then built a business around those rates. We have good relationships with Warner and voluntary licenses with them. We do offer and will continue to offer music from Warner.

According to last month's article in the BBC, however, services like Spotify and Last.fm could be in trouble of losing a large portion of their music library.

While the sheer number of songs is obviously not the deciding factor here, it could be a big one. With control over artists from Frank Sinatra to the Bee Gees to Puff Daddy, Warner's music catalog could be the distinction between life or death for any online streaming music service. And now, with deals with automakers and consumer electronic manufacturers, it looks like Pandora is here to stay.

And as the Times points out, with last month's hiring of CFO Steve Cakebread, the company looks poised to go public in 2010. In the meantime, we wonder what will come of the competition when Warner music officially pulls the plug and leaves them without a "Stairway to Heaven".

Get Glue recognizes when you're looking at a website about a musician, a book, a bottle of wine, a movie or many other types of stuff. Then it makes it easy to look up additional info about that item across other websites like Last.fm, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. It does all of this unobtrusively, with social streams, recommendations and a game.

The newest version of the service recognizes links on search results and social networks, allowing you to invoke a handsome pop-up overlay on those pages as well. Check out the little grey "G" below. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up filled with options for learning more quickly and easily, without leaving the page.

Privacy Concerns

Glue tracks the pages you're visiting, which is ok, but by default it exposes topics you look at on your public profile. You can turn that off and only expose the topics you interact with on Glue, like giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Yesterday I found an entry for a disgusting medical condition on my public Glue profile, because someone else (I swear) used my computer to look the condition up on Wikipedia. I wasn't very happy about that. I now have the setting to expose visits turned off, but the company could explain even that better.

Glue is smart enough that it ought to be able to tell when I'm looking at web content that involves health, sex, money or other touchy topics and ask me if I want to expose those visits. This is just another example of the running debate around passive tracking, over sharing, privacy settings and default social software design.

It's not hard to change this setting and once you do you then you'll probably be pretty happy. It's a shame it's an all-or-nothing thing, though. I'd be happy to expose my browsing history to friends if the types of topics above could be excluded.

Get Glue is pretty awesome and the company adds new features all the time. My profile on the site is here. Come friend me up and we can be nerds together. Especially if you like looking up trippy stuff on the internet.

Disclosure: Glue CEO Alex Iskold is a long-time friend of ReadWriteWeb and one of the nicest, smartest people in the industry. (Read his heart warming personal story here.) His product was also something I disliked using for years until recent updates, so I feel pretty objective about my perception of it. Alex has particularly good taste in books and can be found here on Glue.

According to a Reuters report, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson says he doesn't expect the iPad's launch to lead to very many new AT&T service subscriptions. "My expectation is that there's not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription," he was quoted as saying.

He may be right. As consumers, we're starting to hit a saturation point with how many times we have to pay - again and again - for access to the same Internet. We have our broadband bill for at home, a mobile broadband bill for our laptop's "air card" and a third bill for our phone's data plan. Layer on top of that the numerous subscription services for Internet-accessible content, like Xbox LIVE, Netflix (via their "Watch Instantly" service) and premium music streaming sites like Pandora, Spotify or Last.fm, and it's clear that we've become overloaded. Will anyone out there be able to afford yet another wireless data plan? Apparently, AT&T isn't counting on it.

Will You be Missing Out?

If you plan to use the iPad mainly as an eBook reader and portable media device for streaming iTunes-purchased content, then you won't miss out too much when you go offline, which - let's face it - when you leave the house, that will be most of the time. The majority of iPhone games, all of which will work on the iPad out-of-the-box, won't be affected either. But what about when you want to read the newspaper or a magazine via the iPad? Without an Internet connection to download the latest, you'll be stuck with yesterday's news or last month's edition of Wired. And if you wanted to quickly share something you read on Facebook or Twitter, you would be out of luck, here, too.

However, many people may be willing to live with these limitations. Just as we've learned to sync our iPods and iPhones before we leave the house, we may soon need to remember to update our online newspaper and magazine apps, too. For this minor inconvenience, there's a major payoff: the monthly savings, of course, but also hundreds of dollars off the retail price of the iPad.

In any event, we wonder if AT&T's CEO has any insight into this situation or if he will be surprised by how popular the 3G iPad ends up being. Do you agree with his prediction? Lets find out! Take our poll (linked below) to tell us what iPad you'll buy. (If you're not buying an iPad, then just skip it!)

NY Times readers, click here to access the poll.

Given its reliance on HTML5, Bitspace currently only works with Webkit-based browsers like Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome (Internet Explorer users can, of course, use Google's Chrome Frame plugin). Firefox's implementation of the HTML5 audio tag currently only works with Ogg Vorbis files and does not support playing MP3 files yet.

Uploading and Playing Your Music

Uploading files to Bitspace is fairly straightforward. You can either pick and choose files through the service's web interface, or, if you are a Mac user, you can also use the company's OSX client. Bitspace uses Amazon's storage services for saving your files. The service can import and play most common audio file formats, including MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA and FLAC.

What's currently missing, however, is an easy way to upload larger batches of files. While you can upload multiple MP3 files simultaneously, you can't pick multiple directories, which slows the upload process down quite a bit.

The central focus of Bitspace is obviously the music player. Here, you can organize your tracks by artist, album name, label and year. In addition, you can also manage your playlists here. The minimalist design of the app is one of the highlights of the service The design puts a lot of emphasis on album artwork and makes very good use of HTML5 and the new features it affords developers. Bitspace also integrates with Last.fm and allows you to sync your scrobbles from Bitspace.

Paid Accounts (No Free Accounts for Now)

Bitspace currently offers three different types of paid accounts: basic (limited to 10GB, or the equivalent of 200 albums and 2,000 tracks for €3.99/month), standard (limited to 25GB for €3.99/month) and premium (limited to 50GB for €14.99/month). Sadly, the free accounts (with a limit of 500 MB) are currently invite-only and you will have to sign up for the service and whip out your credit card (though with a free 30 day trial) if you want to test Bitspace.

Update: we originally reported that Bitspace limited users to a certain number of tracks and albums. This is not the case. Bitspace only enforces the limit on disk space.

Verdict

Other services, including Lala, also offer similar streaming music services that allow you to upload your music to the cloud. Lala's big advantage over Bitspace is that it's offering its service for free and doesn't cap its users' uploads. Given that Lala has been acquired by Apple, though, the service's future remains unclear.

Compared to Lala, Bitspace is definitely the prettier service and it's reliance on open web-standards is commendable. Even though the service offers a 30-day trial, the fact that you do have to enter your credit card information or PayPal credentials when signing up will surely keep quite a few potential users from giving it a try (though the prices for the paid accounts are quite fair).

It's important to remember that these are still the early days for Bitspace and the company's co-founder Niklas Holmgren tells us that Bitspace is also working on mobile apps and integrating more social networks into the service.

As time has gone on, we've found fewer and fewer reasons to actually download music and ExtensionFM gives us one less.

Kantor pre-released the music plugin just over two weeks ago with little to-do, but we can't get enough of it. ExtensionFM runs quietly in the background as you browse, collecting any and all tracks and archiving them. If you decide you'd like to listen as you go, you can simply click on the icon and play individual songs, queue songs, or play or queue them all. If you decide that you like a song enough to own it, you can simply right click on it and chose "Buy", which sends you to the song on Amazon. But even if that were to not work, the program keeps the link to the site where it originally found the song.

Then, when you switch over to the full screen extension, all of the tracks you've discovered while browsing are neatly organized by artist, album, track name and even the site where it was originally discovered, with a link, so you can go back and find out more about tracks you like.

When you first start up ExtensionFM, it has six featured sites, including Spinner, Live Music Archive, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Daytrotter and Tuneage, making it easy to get going.

What's even more, ExtensionFM will let you "scrobble" to Last.fm, which means it will follow along and keep track of your music listening habits and send them to your Last.fm account.

We got in touch with Kantor this afternoon and he told us that he does have plans to make ExtensionFM available as a Firefox add-on at some point in the future, but for now it is only available for Chrome. He also said that right now, music can only be played when the user is online, but that offline playing is another feature they're looking into.

Because we have a supply of just 50 beta invite codes, we've put information on how to get your invite on our Facebook page. Head there now to be one of the lucky few, and if you're so inclined, we'd love it if you added us to your Facebook friends, as well!

This new verison of Wikitude also marks the browser's first commercial entries as users can find the nearest Startbucks, Walmart, Harley Davidson or BestBuy locations using the various World filters found on the applications new "Overview" home screen. Some of the Worlds, such as Last.fm events, Meetup Events and Outside.in content, are unique to Wikitude and are innovative inclusions for AR browsing.

First released for Android phones in October of 2008, Wikitude was the very first mobile augmented reality browser to hit the market. Since then Layar, acrossair and hundreds of other mobile AR apps have upped the ante in the mobile AR space, and the latest iteration of Wikitude is in direct response to this competition.

Wikitude's updated features follow a continuing trend in mobile AR to consolidate a group of applications into a single AR browser-like experience. Mobilizy previously produced the AR application C2 YouTube for the iPhone, but has moved that functionality into Wikitude.

Additionally, acrossair's AR browser now includes features like Twitter and Wikipedia entries, which were previously features in their own independent applications. French iPhone app development house Presselite, which made waves with its Metro Paris Subway app, and other transit applications, has since rolled its applications together into the Bionic Eye application. It's only a matter of time before these companies begin rolling games and entertainment, a growing AR sector, into their browsers for one-stop augmented reality experiences.

Mobilizy, Layar, acrossair, and Presselite now have comparable AR browsing applications with Tonchidot not far behind with its more social app, Sekai Camera, the most popular AR app in Japan. Competition is certainly a good thing when it comes to mobile AR, and the deal-breaker in the coming months and years for most users will likely be the commercial content found on the applications.

Which mobile AR application do you like best? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The news comes on the heels of an announcement yesterday by Warner Music that digital revenue, at $184 million, accounts for 20% of total revenue.

In January, we wrote about a report by analyst firm Forrester that predicted that music industry revenues would continue their slide before evening out in 2013, with digital music sales taking up most of the slack.

"On a constant-currency basis, digital revenue grew 4% sequentially and was up 5% from the prior-year quarter," reads yesterday's report from Warner.

The BBC doesn't say when or how this will affect the average person, but when our favorite artists start disappearing from streaming music sites, we'll surely notice.

Update:

We got in touch with Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora, who had this to say regarding the effect this would have on the company. He writes:

This all started with Edgar Bronfman's comment on the Warner conference call where he was addressing free on-demand services such as Spotify that are directly licensed. Pandora operates under a different licensing structure and won't be impacted by Warner's apparent decision with respect to free, on-demand services.

As Recordon notes in today's announcement, technologies like Hive and Cassandra that were first developed in-house by Facebook are now being used and sponsored by a diverse group of companies ranging from CBS and Rackspace to Digg, last.fm and Twitter.

There can be little doubt, however, that open source is, as Apache Foundation chairman Jim Jagielski puts it, "in Facebook's DNA." We can't help but wonder, though, why Facebook didn't decide to go all the way and buy the Platinum sponsorship package.

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Last year, we met up with Livekick's founders in New York to talk about their very thorough site for helping web geeks get out to more shows and concerts. Today, we've discovered Roadie, a much simpler app that focuses on album releases. Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user's Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly.

The RSS feed, which we quickly popped into Google Reader, shows recent and upcoming releases:

And iCal was just as easily added to Google Calendar, for those who prefer those kinds of notifications:

Users can upload other folks' Last.fm faves, as well, if gift-giving ideas are in need. Other features that would make this app even more useful would be a Twitter OAuth to receive DMs the day before or the day of an album's release. And of course, we'd love to see a location-based feature that added tour dates to the mix.

Roadie comes from Portuguese web and mobile dev shop Think Orange, which was founded by a couple of Ruby on Rails geeks. Roadie is an experimental side project for them, and they're looking forward to creating many more projects in 2010. We're looking forward to seeing what they cook up, as well!

Give Roadie a spin, and let us know in the comments what you think. Is this app useful for you?

Without doubt, consumers in 1999 needed better access to music. They needed the opportunity to preview full tracks, to pick and choose songs from an album and to have instant gratification through online downloads. And 10 years later, consumers still have all those lovely perks. Napster ate it (thanks, Metallica!), but Kazaa sprang from its ashes. Then there was Limewire and its cadre. Due props to Apple for monetizing the system as it stood when the iTunes store came on the scene, but users are now ridiculously entitled about what kinds of readily available (a.k.a. easily stolen) files they are willing to pay for and their justifications for stealing media. Yet musicians, as much as they've tried to adapt, are still getting screwed by the Internet and their fans.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Napster CEO Says Consumers Needed Free Music, Control

On the Napster blog CEO, Chris Gorog, wrote yesterday, "The original Napster hadn't thought through how to protect artists' rights... Napster was about putting the control into consumers' hands so they could find virtually any song they could think of."

That kind of thinking makes me twitch. I love users. I am a user. And yes, I've illegally downloaded my fair share of tunes over the years. (Sorry, Journey, but the road trip karaoke sessions would've been meaningless without "Don't Stop Believing".)

However, consumers neither need nor deserve control over content they did not create.

Illegal downloads have been said by many to stimulate sales; the Radiohead album Kid A is often cited as a case in point. But when users are downloading media as a substitute for actually purchasing it, the paradigm hurts musicians far more than it helps. I would venture to speculate that in P2P ecosystems, users get the glory and commercial musicians get the hard knocks. Users have dozens of ways - P2P, YouTube, a bajillion file-sharing sites - to share music that profit the musicians themselves little or not at all.

But where are the online tool kits for the thousands of working musicians - often independent of record labels' heavy duty promotional machines - who live and die by their ability to promote and sell their songs?

Napster introduced a single-edged paradigm: free content for users at musicians' and labels' expense.

What has the Internet done for musicians and labels lately?

Napster Worked Actively Against Musicians, and No One Worked (Well) With Them

Napster spent the first part of this decade showing complete disregard for the promotional and sales needs and wants of musicians. Can you imagine what the musical online landscape would look like if they had seen the copyright wars as an opportunity rather than a legal problem? What would have happened if they had invested that time and money in creating a workable solution for getting users to pay for content? If they'd worked with bands to create and market non-audio, extracurricular content for fans? If they'd been creative instead of passive-aggressively litigious?

Here's what happened to musicians working online since 1999: MySpace.

MySpace, a tragic tale of clunky interfaces, slow fan-finding, spammy marketing tools, confusing events organization, bad media players and no revenue.

While consumers were rejoicing in the newfound glut of free tracks, working musicians (as distinguished from lolling-about-in-the-Playboy-Mansion-grotto musicians), especially the independent ones, had to struggle with the most time-consuming, noisy promotional channel possible. And when a challenger sprung up (Facebook, duh) to take that channel's place, the musicians were homeless because the challenger included no music-related tools.

What's the Future Look Like from the Napster P.O.V.?

Currently, our musician friends are struggling to craft cohesive online marketing and sales strategies from a patchwork of odds and ends.

And Napster?

Gorog examines the current landscape of a la carte online music stores (such as iTunes) and streaming media sites (such as Pandora), concluding, "No service has cracked the nut and figured out how to create a profitable business model." What's his company's solution? "With Napster's new offering introduced on May 18, we believe we bring the best of both worlds together. Five bucks each month gets you 5 MP3s" plus streaming audio.

Let us introduce a long, thoughtful pause in honor of Napster's $5-for-5 subscription plan, which is as unoriginal as it is a bad deal. It's a mashup of two models that Gorgog just stated didn't work, and when compared to Emusic's and other sites' subscription plans (about $12 a month gets you about 30 MP3s) and Last.fm/Imeem/Pandora's free streaming offerings, it seems very financially stupid - especially considering that Napster introduced the now commonly held expectation that all this media should be free. Gorog states he sees a future of subscription plans for unlimited, on-demand music. But again, this is a probably not a paradigm that will profit bands.

It used to be that record labels were in charge of screwing musicians over (click the link for a classic article by producer Steve Albini). Now, that task has passed to the fans themselves, with special thanks to the developers who focus on illegal file-sharing over usable platforms for musicians and consumers alike.

In the coming days, we'd like to address the concerns of and online tools for working/commercial musicians. We're aware of a few good ones, but we encourage you brilliant RWW commenter-types to leave your thoughts - and pointers to musician-friendly startups - below. We've got a cabal of techie-musician-hybrid dudes just waiting to beta test them.

The acquisition was announced just yesterday, and developers were given no warning that their creations would become useless digital paperweights overnight. Among the detrius of the deal is twt.fm, a popular Twitter music-sharing app created by web dev Lee Martin, who tipped us off to his plight today in a blog post.

UPDATE: Users are also reporting problems with blip.fm, a popular music-streaming site that integrated results from iMeem.

"They represented the music business of the future. Now they are a forced hyperlink to a... MySpace landing page making false promises and giving no guidance or help for the developer community they just destroyed.

"Maybe MySpace will return my open streaming API platform... Until then, I'll be brushing the dust off my 1999 Dell computer and getting ready to program music websites like I did 10 years ago."

If indeed MySpace doesn't give developers back their iMeem API, will another streaming music service step in to fill that void? Pandora CEO Tim Westergren revealed in a recent interview that because of licensing issues, Pandora is nowhere close to releasing an open API. Last.fm has an API that allows for web, desktop and mobile development - and it's ironic that Last might have the last API for music mashup developers.

While we wait for comment from MySpace HQ, let us know in the comments what you think of this news, especially if you're a developer who has been using iMeem's API.

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.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that's compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It's intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It's important, exciting and inspiring work.

Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation. This API enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces.

Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don't.

As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future:

An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: "An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities."

In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don't require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at:
http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds.

The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites.

Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used - but it's an important step none the less.

What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It's a powerful new level of granularity.

Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now.

As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds.

Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds.

Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other.

Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company's release could have some very significant consequences.