ARM is not a processor, like Intel or AMD; rather, it's a selection of technologies that a manufacturer licenses from an extensive ARM portfolio, that are condensed into a very small system - usually a system-on-a-chip (SoC). In Sinofsky's blog post today, as well as in an accompanying video - a shot of which is shown above - Microsoft showed three examples of ARM-based devices from (left to right, above) Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, which don't use CPUs the way we know them, but behave enough like a PC to run Windows 8. Or at least, a new form of Windows 8 that resembles the Windows we use today only partly.

"Using WOA [Windows on ARM] 'out of the box' will feel just like using Windows 8 on x86/64," writes Sinofsky. "You will sign in the same way. You will start and launch apps the same way. You will use the new Windows Store the same way. You will have access to the intrinsic capabilities of Windows, from the new Start screen and Metro style apps and Internet Explorer, to peripherals, and if you wish, the Windows desktop with tools like Windows File Explorer and desktop Internet Explorer. It will have the same fast and fluid experience. In other words, we've designed WOA to look and feel just like you would expect. WOA enables creativity in PC design that, in combination with newly architected features of the OS, will bring to customers new, no-compromise experiences."

Another World

Yet while Sinofsky made it very clear - in an abundance of words - that Microsoft will not be compromising on what it has not compromised on, today's blog post does also reveal that those parts of WOA that don't work "the same way" will work a different way. Most different of all will be the Desktop, which is the part of Windows 7 that used to go by the name "Windows." As we noted when the Windows 8 Developer Preview was rolled out last September, the Desktop has become just one of two "worlds" where Windows 8 applications will run. The other is a completely new class of "Metro-style" apps, based on a new runtime called WinRT that is not downwardly-compatible. It's not made for Windows 7, and it's not compatible with Windows Phone 7.

But at least with Windows 8 on PCs running Intel and AMD architectures (x86/x64), most Windows apps since version 3.0 will run on the Desktop. This will not be the case on Windows for ARM for an obvious and unavoidable reason: Applications compiled to run on these processors are not code-compatible with ARM-based platforms. And managed apps made for the .NET Framework - which as late as Spring 2011 was still being touted as the platform of Windows' future - will not run on WOA because the .NET Framework is not code-compatible with ARM, at least not at this time. Sinofsky did not state these facts outright, though he gave plenty of information for an eight-year-old to make the correct deduction.

"WOA does not support running, emulating, or porting existing x86/64 desktop apps," the blog post reads. "Code that uses only system or OS services from WinRT can be used within an app and distributed through the Windows Store for both WOA and x86/64." It also states that if a developer wishes to target WOA as a platform, all he really needs to do is write a Metro-style app using WinRT and regular OS services.

Another Office

So what is the Desktop for in WOA? Why is it there if it can't run a great majority of the Windows apps we've come to know? Sinofsky states that the WOA Desktop will run built-in versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote from the new "Office 15" (probably Office 2013). It will also run a desktop version of Internet Explorer 10 (as indicated by a blue "e" icon on the taskbar in the screenshot), as well as the Windows Explorer file manager.

The division president characterizes this degree of resemblance as "supporting the Windows Desktop experience," adding that applications which can run on the WOA Desktop have been significantly re-architected to support ARM features such as low power consumption and multitouch. At one point, Sinofsky said, the question of how to approach the role of the Desktop for ARM architectures seems ever so faintly like a certain scene from Hamlet:

"To us, giving up something useful that has little cost to customers was a compromise that we didn't want to see in the evolution of PCs. The presence of different models is part of every platform. Whether it is to support a transition to a future programming model (such as including a virtualization or emulation solution if feasible), to support different programming models on one platform (native and web-based applications when both are popular), or to support different ways of working (command shell or GUI for different scenarios), the presence of multiple models represents a flexible solution that provides a true no-compromise experience on any platform."

Which must give us pause, Sinofsky might have added.

Another Form Factor

In a statement to ReadWriteWeb this afternoon, IDC program director for applications development software, Al Hilwa, calls WOA "separate but equal... a different OS on its own schedule, but Microsoft is doing its best to deliver it at the same time."

Hilwa believes that the first WOA-based tablets will be released some time following the first Windows 8-based tablets with Intel and AMD processors, which means this class won't be ready for back-to-school until 2013. In the meantime, he points out that AMD and Intel are feverishly working to improve the power consumption and efficiency of their CPUs.

Assuming PC manufacturers - especially including those who produce Intel's Ultrabook form factor - beat ARM producers to market with competitive street prices, and that their Windows 8 PCs run all the existing software (there's no reason to think they won't), then they could retain a distinct advantage. Today, Microsoft's spokesperson told RWW that the work being done by competitors to produce AMD- and Intel-based PCs represents "an equally strong commitment, new designs, and improved architecture for Windows on this hardware. Microsoft could not be more excited or supportive of the new products from Intel and AMD that will be part of Windows 8 across a full spectrum of PC form factors."

Nevertheless, besides the myriad, perhaps countless, ways in which Windows for ARM is completely different from Windows, it's just the same as the product you haven't come to know yet because it hasn't been released. Because many consumers choose Windows because they need to run Office, Microsoft is making sure that four key Office apps are distributed with WOA. They will use different code bases, but because they're pre-installed, that fact won't matter. What will matter is whether consumers feel they're running Windows while they're using the applications that are the very reason they use Windows.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Now is the Time to Quit Facebook

Did you know there is a movement supporting those who have chosen to quit Facebook? Alicia Eler found that the movement is a great place to discover the stories of those who have left the social behemoth, and maybe buy a t-shirt to celebrate your Facebook abstinence as well.

More Must Read Stories:

Is the Digital Music Revolution Really Ruining Sound Quality?

It seems like every advance in digital music brings with it a debate about whether the latest format degrades quality in exchange for convenience. This was true when CDs first came onto the scene, and it's probably even more true today with MP3s and their digital audio brethren. Heck, even the advent of the gramophone in 1889 sparked debates over whether its sound quality was worse than Thomas Edison's phonograph. (more)

Microsoft Defines the New Mobile Business Experience on iPad

In 1984 and for a few years thereafter, Microsoft got its hands dirty in graphical computing by producing a few surprisingly mediocre applications for Macintosh, starting with a port of its otherwise decent spreadsheet called Multiplan. By the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, many of us felt the company would never again premiere a software concept on a machine bearing an Apple logo. (more)

The Most Social Super Bowl Breaks Records, Offers Advertisers Lessons

Twitter did not crash and the Super Bowl became the most tweeted sporting event in history, averaging more than 10,000 tweets per second.

That wasn't all that surprising: continued growth of the social network, not to mention tablet and smartphone technology that make it easier to tweet while watching television, means that record will probably be broken several times between now and next year's Super Bowl. (more)

Google Begins Building 1-Gigabit Internet Service in Kansas City

Google breaks ground today on the super-fast fiber optic network it plans to build for the lucky residents of Kansas City, Kan. They'll get a 1 gigabit-per-second Internet connection, which will offer downloads 100 times faster than what most Americans get. Uploads will be a thousand times faster than average. (more)

Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year

The growth of the mobile Web is on a steady rise. While pundits throw around words like "explosive" and "outrageous" the more precise word is probably "consistent." According to analytics firm StatCounter, users accessing the Web through mobile devices has almost doubled every year since 2009. In its latest report, StatCounter says that global Internet usage through mobile devices rose to 8.5%, nearly doubling the 2011 figure of 4.3%. (more)

The Online Ad Fails at the Super Bowl

While most of us know the results of yesterday's Big Game, the results of the online ad campaigns from the dozens of companies spending multiple millions are less clear. Fortunately, monitoring firm Yottaa is here to lead the way and let us know who scored and who missed serving up online content to complement their TV spots. (more)

Believe It Or Not, There's An Upside To Diminished Online Privacy

Sunday's New York Times was a Luddite's dream. Tthe paper's Sunday Review section had three lengthy opinion pieces dedicated to "Life Under Digital Dominance" (their words, not mine), including Evgeny Morozov's lengthy treatise that social media will kill originality because we're all too afraid to publicly "like" something on Facebook that our friends don't like, a plea to adopt European-style rules to keep data private and a particularly threatening piece by Lori Andrews promising sudden cuts in our personal credit lines and troubles obtaining insurance because Facebook is using us. (more)

Twitter Could Go Public In 2013, But Why Bother?

If last week's highly-anticipated Facebook IPO was too much excitement, not to mention too many numbers packed into a dense, 197-page S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, breathe easy: it does not appear as if Twitter has any short-term plans to follow suit and become the last of the big three social networks to trade as a public company. (more)

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Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era? Well, it's back and this time it actually has substance. Convergence in the 90s meant combining old media with new media, a.k.a. the Internet. The 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner was a failed $200 billion attempt at convergence. But fast forward to 2012 and convergence is happening for real this time, thanks to Internet-connected devices in the house and a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Entertainment now flows freely through home networks, to multiple devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and television sets.

According to one research firm, 2012 will be when convergence really hits its stride. A new report by IMS Research states that 2012 will be when the consumer electronics industry "finally realizes the promise of multi-screen content consumption."

It's not just Web connected hardware which is proliferating. Software is also finally fulfilling the long-held promise of convergence. We saw a great example earlier today, with version 3.0 of the video aggregator app Showyou being released. ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell described it as "the remote control for web video."

The beauty of Showyou is that you can watch videos on a variety of devices: PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, Apple TV. While I was eating my lunch today, I sat down in the living room and opened both my iPad and TV. I surfed to a music video on Showyou that I like and pressed the Apple "airplay" button on the iPad to transfer the video to my TV (via Apple TV).

I'm not entirely convinced that 2012 will be the year when this multi-screen promise is realized. During my lunchtime, I fiddled around a bit with Airplay before I got it working. Also home networks are not particularly user friendly for non-technical people. 2012 may well be a tipping point, when convergence within the home begins to take off. But we're not at the point of great user experiences yet.

In its report, IMS Research noted that an apps ecosystem for devices like the TV will be a key enabler of convergence in home entertainment. It also pointed to the growing amount of digital content available to consumers and "the changing habits of consumers regarding accessing, consuming and sharing digital content."

IMS Research predicts that the market for IP-enabled CE devices will grow from 2.2 billion devices shipped in 2011 to 3.5 billion in 2016. Note that this is just for home entertainment and portable consumer electronic devices. We reported last week that mobile industry group GSMA is predicting growth from 9 billion to 24 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide. The GSMA's figures include things like connected cars and IP-enabled washing machines.

Have you begun to consume entertainment in your home across multiple screens? If so, let us know in the comments what your current favorite household apps are.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Anti-Patterns for Technical Leaders

Joe Brockmeier, reporting from the Monki Gras conference in London, shared management learnings gleaned from Joyent technical leaders, Jason Hoffman, CTO, and Bryan Cantrill, Vice President of Engineering. Of particular interest were their tech leadership anti-patterns. If you've worked for a tech enterprise, you'll probably recognize at least a few of these types.

More Must Read Stories:

How YouTube is Part of a Global Economic Transformation

The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences. (more)

Looking for a Better HootSuite? Try Gremln.

If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday. (more)

Biggest Winners In Facebook's IPO

When Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953, he famously offered photographers, writers and artists the choice of cash or stock in the then-private company. While most chose cash, a few held onto shares that were worth millions by the time the company went public. (more)

One More Reason to Jailbreak Your iPhone 4S: Tweaking Siri

The first untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 dropped two weeks ago, much to the excitement of the hundreds of thousands of people who rushed to download it.

Despite its recent growth in popularity, jailbreaking is still not a mainstream activity among iPhone and iPad owners generally. (more)

Showyou 3.0: The Remote Control for Web Video

Showyou 3.0 launches today, and if you watch videos on an iPad, a Kindle Fire, an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you need to try it. If you have an Apple TV, so much the better. Showyou brings in all the videos from your various social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. It displays them for you in a glorious, sweeping grid organized by magic. (more)

StumbleUpon Says Goodbye to Direct Links

When StumbleUpon did its big rebranding, reorganizing and redesign late last year, we figured that the 20-million-plus discovering engine was done making big changes. At least, for a little while. Boy were we wrong.

The newest SU update removes all direct links. (more)

Jumptap: Use of Native Apps Versus Mobile Web is Tied

The mobile advertising industry was a $1 billion business in 2011. It is expected to hit $6.5 billion by 2014, according to eMarketer. For reference, it was 1998 when Web advertising hit the $1 billion mark. In 2010, it was a $26 billion industry fueling the growth of companies like Google and other Web-centric properties. (more)

New Reuters Site Turns News Decisions Over To Social Media

News agency Reuters launched Social Pulse, which it describes as a "social media hub" that will display "the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web."

The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne." (more)

Why Facebook Will Become a Food Porn Kingdom

On the same day that Facebook announced its IPO, the FoodSpotting app dished up a few new offerings. Now it creates a personalized picture menu for you, the FoodSpotting user, delivering "smart dish recommendations" based on what you like. The "filter wheel" categorizes food into dishes that you want to try and have already tried, and those you hope to never eat again; you can also see how your friends feel about various dishes. (more)

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We've compared Showyou's previous versions to Flipboard and Instapaper, which is pretty esteemed company for an iOS app. As a set of features, those comparisons are apt. But the interface takes it a step further. The app takes full advantage of the touchscreen. It's a better interface than TV has ever had. And you don't just watch on your device; you can AirPlay it to your Apple TV and just use Showyou as the remote. Whatever it was about TV that Steve Jobs said he "finally cracked," it was probably something like this.

Showyou has this figured out in so many ways. No other app has this grid interface, for one thing. The main screen of all your videos flows under your fingers like Microsoft's Surface or something out of Minority Report, except this is something you can have right now.

When you go further in to the app, whether you're browsing a category or a friend's videos, the interface is reined in a little, going to a simpler, scrolling column. The new navigation drawer helps you get reoriented quickly and easily.

The sources of the videos in Showyou are your friends and the people you follow. It connects to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod, which is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou. There are also some publisher channels, like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, TED and more. The main grid shows videos from all the sources you're following, and you can narrow down by source, by topic or hashtag, or by the person sharing. It even has pretty fast search using all that social metadata, with an index of nearly 30 million videos so far.

Showyou is free, and it will become ad-supported as it grows. It's also considering a subscription service for certain shows or publishers. The big question is whether Showyou will get licenses for major TV shows or movies. "Not yet," its people say. "Maybe soon." But YouTube viewing is eclipsing TV, anyway. For iPad or Kindle Fire owners, or even for iPhone and iPod Touch, Showyou should be in your living room.

Rawporter, an iPhone app that will soon be rolled out for Android, turns almost anyone into a local news cameraman or camerawoman. Instead of dispatching a camera crew to a fire during rush hour and risk they won't get there until after the flame is out, a television news reporter can create an assignment from Rawporter's Web interface and send it to anyone with the app who may be in the area of the fire.

Speaking at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York on Saturday, Rawporter co-founder Rob Gaige said the assignment feature allows producers to tell photographers how much they'll be paid. Photo and video journalists retain rights to the work they create using the app and can share it with their followers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

"Our job is to make your job easier," Gaige told conference attendees, most of whom were journalists, and many of whom were not buying assertions that Rawporter would not threaten their already tenuous job security.

Even an instructional video on Rawporter's Web site notes that traditional news crews are "too costly and too slow for today's news market" and that viewers don't want to see "a reporter talking about the aftermath" when they can watch an event as it unfolds.

The app itself is relatively straightforward to use.It feels a lot like Instagram, except it also offers push notifications from news outlets looking for content. I've been using it since Saturday and, so far, no assignments have been tossed my way but, then again, as far as I know I have not been in the vicinity of any newsworthy events.

For producers looking to fill a sudden news hole, there's not a lot of user-generated content to choose from just yet (aside from videos shot at the conference where Gaige was speakinbg, the most recent video is from a Jan. 23 vigil following the death of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno).

Rawporter just launched in November, so it may take awhile for accidental journalists to discover the site, and for producers to figure out if they're breaking union contracts by outsourcing camera work for $10 or $25 a clip.

"Blogging is largely dead."

"There are a lot of stupid people out there ... and stupid people shouldn't write."

"There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people."

Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google's Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. 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 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Web 3.0: The Age of Expertise

"You have to have a deep understanding to be a blogger," Calacanis said.

Calacanis thinks that Web 3.0 will be the "Age of Expertise." Blogging brought about the era of Web 2.0 where people who may not have had a voice before could publish whatever they want. The rise of kittens on the Web, for instance. Add the ability to comment on stories and then share them through social media and Web 2.0 was the Age of Interactivity.

"The concept of journalism is going away," Calacanis said. "It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert."

Calacanis brings up the idea of local news as something that people do not care about. In that vein, he thinks that AOL local news effort Patch, which the company has poured millions of dollars into, will ultimately fail. Instead of just the news of a local McDonalds being built, people want how much that new franchise will cost, what benefit it will have for the local economy etc.

"People bring up the edge case of the local town meeting," Calacanis said. "Who gives a f***l? Nobody cares anymore."

The blog itself is not going away. People will continue to have a voice and low barrier to put that voice on the Web. Yet, that doesn't mean that anybody will be paying attention.

"People and their blogs will continue," Calacanis said. "But, I think that experts will inherit the space."

That is what Calacanis is starting to do with Mahalo. He considers the site to be a "video education company." He wants employees who are a "triple threat" - the ability to shoot video, edit and produce video and be the host of the video.

On Mahalo vs. Google Panda and Launch

As Experian reported in April, Mahalo's traffic has been crushed by the changes to Google's algorithm - codenamed Panda - designed to limit the affect of content farms in search results.

"Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half," Calacanis said. "Yet, it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all."

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things.

"Within a year, Launch will have more traffic than TechCrunch," Calalcanis said.

For this year's ReadWriteWeb list of the most important and influential consumer-grade cloud computing apps of the year 2011, we focused our gaze on services that truly fit the formal definition: specifically, services that 1) utilize a remote resource of 2) variable capacity 3) which the user can provision for herself, 4) which is mostly or totally independent of programs installed on the user's devices or PCs, and 5) which is not just a Web site with a big server. You may have seen Facebook on some publications' Top Cloud lists already; by our definition, Facebook is not a cloud service. But we did look for providers that perform innovative, discrete functions built around their services.

Hosting services are not cloud apps for purposes of this list; and there are plenty of innovative hosts to consider (we gave serious thought to Wistia), but in the end we decided that a hosting service is not really an application unless it provides a discrete function that goes over and above simple storage or sharing. Analytics, which Wistia provides, is right on the edge, but it's really a measurement of a byproduct of using the service as opposed to a function that users actually perform. That's not saying Wistia isn't a great idea; it just belongs on another list.

10. CloudApp. The largest single category of cloud apps for consumers is storage and retrieval, which is understandable because it's a service that everyone needs to one degree or another. What's interesting is how certain services innovate on this theme, and especially whether they give themselves room to continue innovating.

CloudApp is for Mac OS and iOS users at the moment, and its innovation is that it's building a little ecosystem around itself. It utilizes your choice of quick-and-easy gestures for designating a file or object to send to CloudApp's storage, the most basic of which is dragging and dropping the object to CloudApp's icon in the taskbar. In exchange for this gesture, CloudApp produces a URI which is copied to the Clipboard. From there, you can paste it into an e-mail, a tweet, or an IM message; when your recipient receives the link, she has instant access to the object.

The way CloudApp innovates is by incrementally enhancing what can be easily uploaded, and how those objects can be utilized in their native context. One example is screenshots: You can designate a key for taking a screenshot and uploading it in one fell swoop; the recipient sees your link, clicks on it, and sees your screen. There's no exporting or importing necessary here.

But what hoisted CloudApp onto our Top 10 list this year is how well the company is promoting Raindrops. This is an extremely clever, self-promotional idea for enabling developers to build their own tools that utilize CloudApp in similarly contextual ways, with the help of CloudApp's own API. One example the company created at the time this feature was launched in April 2010 is for Adobe Photoshop; since then, the community has contributed a truckload more, including an intelligent link interpreter for Twitter and a stand-alone CloudApp client for iOS called Stratus.

Here's an example (above) of another add-on you can't even see (which is a good thing): The maker of SparrowMail used CloudApp's API to develop a way to do simple drag-and-drop of attachments into e-mail messages, bypassing Mac OS' sometimes convoluted series of steps.

Building a community around something as simple as an app is a difficult thing for a small company to achieve, especially when it's in competition with a plethora of other vendors in the same category. CloudApp is pulling this off brilliantly. (It's worth noting that the service is built on the open-source Heroku platform from Salesforce, thus answering RWW's question from last year on whether developers will trust Heroku: Yes.)

9. Waze. What would be nice is if someone hired a few thousand cars to drive around each town looking for traffic incidents, and report on them in real-time. Let's see, $25 bucks per hour salary times 1,000 reporters times 50 cities... I'll get back to you on that idea.

Or, what would be brilliant is if someone leveraged the platform that's already in existence to enable a few thousand folks to do this job passively and voluntarily. Waze is a system that utilizes the GPS information being pinged back from iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices. It's been in existence since 2006, but last October the 3.0 version of the service introduced a fabulous new feature (so far, just for the iPhone users) that integrates with Twitter. This way, people can tweet on what's happening in their neighborhoods (including the good things, like street fairs) from right where they're standing.

Okay, maybe there aren't a thousand Waze users in a city like mine (Indianapolis) just yet, but it's surprising what you can find. There's updates on traffic accidents and reported police sightings (which are rarer in some cities than others). What Waze demonstrates is that there are ways of making use of data that can be collected passively from a crowd of users, in ways that do not jeopardize privacy.

8. Box.net. This is one of the services that comes to most folks mind when they know what a cloud app is. What's kept Box.net in the news, including just this month - and what keeps Box.net on our list this year - is a constant stream of innovations. Customizable synchronization is one example from last fall; and earlier this month, a completely revamped iOS app that enables features like uploading photos and videos to discrete folders. This puts Box.net on a par with dedicated photo-sharing services that simply can't expand its features list to Box.net's size. And just this morning, the company launched an enterprise-grade option for unlimited storage.

Next: Playing your own tune...

7. Audiobox.fm. My wife and I are both Pandora fans, although last year I found it ironic that both of us had been working - albeit without admitting it to ourselves - to make Pandora play music we actually already owned. Yes, that sounds like a pathetic waste of precious seconds, but there it is.

Audiobox.fm, launched last year, is the streaming service that folks need anyway: one which enables them to store the music they own in the cloud ($3.99 for 11 GB is pretty fair) and also play that music from any device using the service's own media player. ITunes users who were a bit discouraged last year by Audiobox.fm's dedicated player were treated this year to the option of streaming their own M3U files from cloud storage, to their player of choice (with variable results, especially in the case of Winamp, but not for lack of trying).

6. Joukuu. We introduced you to this storage maintenance service last month, calling it a "cloud cloud." It's a Web-based console for displaying in a single list the contents of files stored to Google Docs, Box.net, and Dropbox (Microsoft SkyDrive support still forthcoming). When you work with many colleagues on a project, and they all subscribe to different services (often the case with independent contractors who happen to be paired together), Joukuu is a true timesaver. And the drag-and-drop functionality of its outside-the-browser app saves you about a thousand clicks per day.

5. Hojoki. (If you weren't looking carefully enough, with definitions of Joukuu and Hojoki, you'd think this would be a foreign language course.) Entire billion-dollar-plus industries are built around so-called "collaboration platforms" that enable sharing and versioning of documents among members of teams. And yet there are individual cloud apps (Beanstalk, Dropbox, Evernote, GitHub) that are involved with the individual tasks around collaboration, and which all have managed identity, but which are not linked together.

So it really took more clever observation than creative genius to create Hojoki, but the premise works just the same as if genius were involved from the beginning. Hojoki is a messaging system that looks an awful lot like something you'd see from Salesforce. It builds a stream of people with whom you're already sharing contacts, and lets you organize them into groups for collaborative projects. The activities that all of you share within that group are pipelined through the Hojoki stream to everyone in that group, so it becomes an automatic task progress monitor. The service is currently in beta, although it's already made significant inroads, and there will be a business model attached to a premium service once the beta cycle is complete.

4. Do.com. Nothing more thoroughly demonstrates the rapidly changing state of the applications market in general than the fact that Microsoft Outlook's greatest competition in over a decade comes from something that isn't really an e-mail client. Do.com from Salesforce includes the level and ease of functionality for file sharing and collaboration that enterprises may have already attached to Outlook by way of add-ons, but which aren't available for everyday Outlook users.

And by tying Do.com to Gmail as its primary messaging service, Salesforce is wedging itself beneath Outlook and threatening to uproot it from home users' and small business users' systems. Do.com may not be a threat yet to Exchange, though it may put a dent in Hosted Exchange services for smaller businesses. Nonetheless, it's demonstrating that even an e-mail client with "2010" in its name is looking more and more like "1980."

Next: Is there beauty yet to be found in the cloud...

3. Spotify. The reason for the decline, if not yet outright collapse, of the global recording industry is that it is has not been meaningful or desirable for consumers to own music. The industry's principal delivery system for music, even to this date, remains a container that consumers no longer want; and the system that consumers prefer, and which a majority of them now actually use, is something that the industry has yet to truly embrace. Services like Last.fm and Pandora are more convenient than music ownership and, for more users today, more interesting than radio.

Spotify gambles with the notion that $9.99/month subscriptions to its premium mobile services (estimated last month at about 2.5 million) will be enough to pay down the royalties it undoubtedly owes for all its users, including those who use the free Spotify Radio desktop app to choose the music they want from Spotify's huge library. RWW's John Paul Titlow has been covering Spotify and Spotify Radio very thoroughly, in part 1 and part 2; and RWW's Jon Mitchell named Spotify #6 in his list of overall Top 10 Consumer Web Apps for 2011.

But what made Spotify qualify here again as a Top Cloud App is something it didn't have last year: an apps ecosystem of its very own. If you're thinking we've screwed up and posted a picture of Last.fm instead... well, it's no screw-up. Spotify's new desktop application, with music recommendation apps built-in, is so strong that it includes Last.fm as one of its recommendation providers, along with Rolling Stone magazine and TuneWiki.

When fully built out, the Spotify apps ecosystem will enable what the company is calling an "authentication layer" between record labels, app developers, and users. The technology that the record industry could not find it within itself to build for itself, may just end up being built for it. When that happens, it may have a certain deity to thank, followed immediately by Spotify.

2. iCloud. The establishment of Apple's stronghold in devices, and the services that support them, was deliberate, systematic, and in almost every aspect of its execution, brilliant. The exception was MobileMe, a service whose frequent slip-ups and uncharacteristically dramatic failures led Steve Jobs to openly declare its launch "not our finest hour."

Therefore iCloud could be noteworthy for having (at least thus far) not been a spectacular failure. But the brilliance of Apple's marketing has left many with the impression that iCloud has no direct competition with Android. What Android does lack, and what iCloud does provide, is a context of the service as an ever-present resource that's attached, albeit ethereally, to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Of course it's an Apple-only service, but haven't all Apple-produced disk drives since 1978 been Apple-only? From Apple's perspective, why must a virtual device, by definition, be more platform-agnostic than a physical one?

Because it's just another Apple device, it's programmable like an Apple device. Developers can build apps around it, and create new functions and methods that Apple Corp. hasn't even foreseen. For any other platform, this would be a great thing; from Apple's perspective, it could easily become perceived as an effort by independents to trim their way through Apple's carefully walled garden. Expect some "openness" issues to crop up around iCloud throughout 2012.

1. Evernote. Bill Gates was known to have overused the word "great" during his press appearances as the head of Microsoft, so there are probably thousands of sound bites of the phrase "great apps" just waiting to be compiled into the next great, annoying YouTube mash-up. Only a few apps get to be described as things of beauty.

At its core, Evernote does one thing, and does that very well. It collects clips of data from the Web sites you're reading or the applications you're using, and gathers them into categories that can be synced in the cloud and accessed from multiple devices. I noticed Evernote had pervaded the apps repertoires of many of the Syracuse University students we covered during last month's MLB.com Apps Challenge. Now that laptops, tablets, and in some universities, thin client desktops are the principal research tool of every scholar, Evernote has quickly risen to the level of ubiquitousness among this specific class of users - as invaluable to the work they do as Twitter.

Whether Evernote rises to the level of "beauty" depends on whether it raises its batting average of late. My friend and colleague Joe Brockmeier discovered the latest app in the Evernote ecosystem, called Hello, was perhaps a little less than half-baked. Nevertheless, the core of Evernote has joined Box.net, Dropbox, and Google Docs as the very definition of "cloud app" among users who know the cloud, and who truly do get it.

In its press release announcing the open sourcing of webOS, HP said all the right things. It will continue to invest and be an active participant. It will provide inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation. It will be purely open source. Those almost seems to be conflicting statements. HP may think that it is trying to create a new Android ecosystem, but HP and Google's approaches to mobile are going in opposite directions.

So, HP is now distancing itself from webOS under the guise of making it open source. It presumably could not find a company willing to buy the platform so now it is taking the only avenue that is available. HP now has very little way to make money off of webOS. As a licensed open source project, it is not going to be able to sell licenses to the platform, the way Microsoft does with Windows Phone. Nor does it have Google's clout in the advertising world to monetize webOS the way Android does. HP must pin its hope on the notion that developers, OEMs and carriers will pay HP for its software and cloud services in the development of webOS applications.

Herein lays the problem. As an open source project, developers will be able to choose whatever cloud and development tools they want. The fact that webOS is so closely tied to the Web does not help either because there are a variety of solutions to make HTML5 Web apps outside of HP. From the startup realm with companies like appMobi, Sencha, Appcelerator to enterprise developer companies like IBM and SAP, HP has no way to tie the development process to itself in an open source environment. Google has accepted this fact and lets the Android ecosystem do as it pleases because as long as people have Android devices in their hands, Google stands to make money from when and how they use the Web and native apps on the device.

Android may be open source, but Google ties itself very closely to how and when it can be used by OEMs and carriers. Throughout 2011, Google has moved to bind Android more closely to it, such as the fact that the Honeycomb version 3.0 was never made available to the public. This is where Google differs from HP. Google is tying Android closer to its home base. HP, out of necessity, has to push webOS away.

That may be a bad thing for HP, but it is not necessarily a bad consequence for the mobile ecosystem. By pushing webOS away, HP all of a sudden gives the mobile ecosystem an instantly viable platform to build off. This is not some half-baked project like MeeGo or Tizen. Palm and webOS have the code base to produce high quality smartphones now. Look for Samsung, HTC, LG and other OEMs to all of a sudden become very interested in what they can do with webOS.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

Top Web Developer Tools of 2011

Joe Brockmeier lists this year's Top Web Developer Tools, including well known tools like jQuery and Chrome's Developer Tools and also highlights some off-the-beaten-path tools that made big impacts in 2011. As with all our year end posts, please let us know if you have anything to add.

From the comments:

J S - I'm sticking with Flash & Flex & AIR. Once you can do what Flash can do in the libraries mentioned above, and joyfully, skinfully. I'll use them professionally, till then these are just side projects and hobbies to me.

We need a thorough HTML5/JS/CSS3 framework that can match Flex, or at least close to what it can provide would be good enough."

More Must Read Stories:

Windows 8 Beta, Windows Store for Apps in Late February

Ever since Windows 3.0, new versions of Windows have essentially been extensions of the existing platform. Windows 8 is not. It is a bold and undisguised effort to shuttle an existing user base of tens of millions from one platform to another, leaving the lights on over the Desktop so folks moving off the old platform can still see. (more)

Evernote Announces Food & Hello to Remember What You Ate and Who You Ate It With

Evernote has announced two new apps to help you remember what you ate and the names of the people you are eating with, dubbed Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. (more)

A Deep Look Into IBM's Mobile Development Strategy

IBM is poised to unleash its revamped mobile strategy with a full suite of tools aimed at providing enterprise developers with an end-to-end system for collaboration, development and management for mobile applications. (more)

Demand For New iPhone App Crashes Flipboard

If you're having trouble loading content on Flipboard this morning, you are not alone. The service has been struggling due to high demand for its new iPhone app, the startup confirmed via Twitter. (more)

Why Microsoft Office is Our PC's Kudzu

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Despite the RIAA, File-Sharing Wins Unexpected New Allies

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Facebook's Updated Android App Looks a Lot Like its iPad App

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No More "BBX": Trademark Dispute Reveals Strange RIM Stance

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New Subscribe Plugin For Websites Makes Facebook More Like Twitter

Joanna Shield, VP and managing director for Facebook Europe, Middle East and Africa's (EMEA), announced at the LeWeb 2011 that the company will soon rollout a Subscribe plugin for websites. This will make it even easier for Facebook users to follow feeds from a politician, news reporter, public figure, celebrity, Mark Zuckerberg's dog Beast, artist, Facebook employee or other "notable" person. (more)

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When Gowalla launched in 2009, it faced off against rival location-based social network Foursquare. Since then, Foursquare grew leaps and bounds in the location space, transitioning from a check-in service to a partner of daily deals giant Groupon. Gowalla got lost in the dust.

Read our full coverage of Gowalla, 2010 up to right now, after the jump.

The last time we reported on Gowalla, things seemed similarly bleak and rather vague. Gowalla had just dumped its virtual goods and place annotations feature, which allowed users to collect and drop virtual goods for each other at various places they checked-in to. Gowalla said it was releasing new features that would "encourage more exploration of the real world." Of course, that's not what Facebook's Timeline is. But somewhere along the way, things must have changed.

We reached out to Facebook spokespeople and will report back with any new information.

Gowalla: A Timeline

• August 25, 2011: Virtual Goods & Place Annotation Abandoned by Gowalla
• December 4, 2010: The New Gowalla is Both Wonderful & Terrible
• December 2, 2010: Gowalla 3.0: One Check-In to Rule Them All
• November 18, 2010: Can Gowalla's Disney Deal Help Location Check-Ins go Mainstream?
• October 28, 2010: Facebook to Launch Local Shopping Deals With Check-ins; Look Out Groupon
• August 25, 2010: TIME's 50 Best Websites 2010: Gowalla Picked over Foursquare?
• July 30, 2010: Like a Robot Struck by Lightning: Gowalla to Launch Write API, Possibly With Pictures
• July 27, 2010: Are Location-Based Services All Hype?
• July 21, 2010: Gowalla Goes to Comic-Con with Blackberry Beta
• July 14, 2010: Best Small Cities to Live, According to CNNMoney & Gowalla
• June 15, 2010: Gowalla Offers Trips & Travel Guides with USA TODAY
• April 7, 2010: Gowalla Adds Real-time Feeds and Activity Streams For Maximum Mashup Action
• March 10, 2010: The Location-Based Wars Rage On: Gowalla Adds Comments, Photos & More
• March 8, 2010: Gowalla Follows Foursquare's Lead with Real-Life Incentives
• February 28, 2010: POLL: What Location-Based Mobile App(s) Will You Use During SXSW?
• February 23, 2010: Gowalla is the Anti-FarmVille

Sites that benefited from the update tend to be content sites and brand sites with frequent updates. Many are news sites, but others are travel sites or other consumer sites. The sites that lost in this update are more of a grab bag. Many of them are government websites or less time-sensitive news organizations.

Searchmetrics measures SEO visibility of sites across the Web. Its results are adjusted to eliminate outliers in either relative or absolute terms. In the Caffeine update, the biggest winner was last.fm, which shares the music its users are listening to right now. It gained in SEO visibility by 12.56%. Comcast.net lost the most ground, falling 23.02%.

Caffeine winners:

Caffeine losers:

See the Searchmetrics blog for the full list.

Google Search Going Real-Time

Google's Caffeine update is its latest effort to gather its own real-time search signals after its 2009 deal with Twitter expired. With social data from Google+, Google now has a range of ways to determine timeliness and relevance of Web content. It offers true real-time search within Google+, and it surfaces Google+ posts in Web search results.

Do you find Google's adjustments to the timeliness of search results helpful, or do you prefer absolute page rank?

UrbanAirship was born just a few short years ago, when a team of unemployed online bacon salesmen found out they could offer mobile push notifications and in-app sales functionality fast enough and cheap enough that brands all over the world would buy their service rather than build it themselves. That company grew fast and led by CEO Scott Kveton has apparently acquired SimpleGeo, a company led by an even more storied CEO, Jay Adelson of Equinix and Digg. Adelson has been at SimpleGeo for just under a year and there is no word yet about whether he'll be joining Airship.

How did UrbanAirship get this big this fast? By facilitating and measuring mobile analytics and commerce.

Why did SimpleGeo not take off? Are companies buying data about places from other companies, or not from anyone at all? It's hard to say, but at least one competing geodata service provider tells us that pure API plays are hard to pull off and that could be the entire explanation.

It's a merging of two technical companies: one that lets publishers easily stay engaged with and sell to their software users on mobile devices, the other a company that helps put the location of those mobile devices into context with data about the real-world locations they are in.

Update: The deal is confirmed. SimpleGeo's blog post is here. UrbanAirship's is here. Airship CEO Kveton says that Jay Adelson, Joe Stump and Matt Galligan will become strategic advisors to the company. Thirteen employees will stay in San Francisco and UrbanAirship now has 51 people on staff.

Our most important coverage of these two companies over the years is below.

About UrbanAirship

How Urban Airship Saved Tapulous's Bacon on iPhone 3.0 Day
The Incredible Story of Scott Kveton: Linux, Firefox, Bacon & iPhones
Urban Airship's In-App Purchase for Android Goes Live
Mobile Marketing Made Easier & Smarter: Urban Airship Launches New Publishing & Reporting Tools

About SimpleGeo

To Describe to Us the World: Former Digg CEO Joins Location Startup SimpleGeo
SimpleGeo Launches, Aims to Make All Apps Geo-Aware
Most Promising Company For 2011: SimpleGeo

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

We covered Thoora's features earlier this week. It's a compelling alternative to the social search phenomenon of letting your friends' tastes substitute for real context. Thoora uses machine learning algorithms to help users build topics using keywords, popularity, and over 100 other quality signals. It's especially good at finding articles from small blogs deep within the Web, a shortcoming of typical search tools. Its attractive interface makes for a great user experience for both work and play applications, and the tablet form factor is a natural fit.

The UI is consistent with the Web version, but menus and controls have been moved to the periphery and organized in a familiar two-column tablet layout.

It's a great fit on a Motorola Xoom, and Carrie Shaw, Thoora's head of product, says that the Honeycomb-based app will be tested on the Kindle Fire as soon as possible. If it works as expected, they'll submit it to the Amazon Appstore. Thoora is also developing for iPad and phones, looking to ship those versions before the end of the year.

Grab the app from the Android Market, try it out and tell us what you think! If you create any cool topics, share them in the comments.

The Kindle Fire is a tablet, built off Android. Amazon developers forked Android somewhere along the way, probably from either the Frozen Yogurt 2.2 or Gingerbread 2.3.4 so really, this is actually a tablet built off a smartphone OS and not the official Android tablet OS, Honeycomb. Yet, Amazon is about to blow the rest of the Android tablet ecosystem out of the water.

What does Amazon have that Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Huawei do not?

In a word ... everything.

See our main news for the feature list of what the new Kindle Fire will bring. Media, retail, music, books, video. It is like Facebook's "Read, Watch, Listen" embodied in a device you can actually hold, without the open social graph API tied to it. The Kindle Fire is not just about premium Android apps (more on that below) but a full-fledged media device a la Apple's iPad. Really, no other Android tablet can integrate that same experience and that is why the tech media has been excited about this thing since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos hinted at it in May.

The first large Android tablet was the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab. It was built off of Android 2.2 and essentially was a large Samsung Galaxy S. The first real Android tablet based off of the tablet OS was the Motorola Xoom built off of Android 3.0. In the almost eight months that the Xoom has been on the market, it has been a basic flop. There are a variety of other Android tablets on the market right now, based both on Honeycomb and the various smartphone derivations such as the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 and 8.9 (Honeycomb) and the HTC Flyer and Evo 3D View (Gingerbread).

The Kindle Fire is everything that the Motorola Xoom is not

What exactly is the Kindle Fire? It is not like the 7-inch Galaxy Tab that is basically a large smartphone. Nor is it a Xoom-like large tablet (though there are rumors that a 10-inch Kindle Fire may come out next year). Basically, this comes down to a simple question: what Android apps will the Kindle Fire actually run?

It Boils Down to Apps

The answer: will be smartphone applications chosen specifically by Amazon to be optimized to the 7-inch screen that are compatible back to Android 2.2. There is no word yet though on how Amazon will upgrade its build of Android. A big part of Ice Cream Sandwich will be backward and forward compatibility of Honeycomb and smartphone apps. Will Amazon upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich when it is available or will they stick with the smartphon build. How will Amazon handle OS upgrades in general?

This comes down to the fundamental nature of what Kindle Fire actually is. It is a fork of Android yet built on top of Android. How does that make it any different from the skins that the OEMs build on top of Android like HTC does with Sense? Like HTC, Amazon did not fundamentally change Android. They built on top of it and by doing so created something entirely new that is laser-focused on Amazon's services.

You may notice a theme here. There are a lot of questions that do not have answers except in the halls of Amazon's development center. We have contacted Amazon for an explanation of how they built out Android for the Kindle Fire. We are hopeful that they will get back to us but to be honest, they almost never do when it come to issues like these.