Wakoopa has not just collated the most popular Windows, Mac, and web applications, but it's also identified newcomers that showed prolific growth during 2008.

1. Wakoopa is a relatively small community, composed primarily of tech fanatics and early adopters. The statistics reflect that.

2. The applications mentioned aren't necessarily the most frequently visited applications, but rather those that people have spent the most time actively using; that is, those with the highest user engagement levels.

PC

On Windows, it's no surprise to see Firefox and Internet Explorer as the top two most-used applications. Google Chrome is the only new release of the year to have made the list, showing extremely impressive growth from the moment of its release in September. Chrome does, however, still sit behind Opera in terms of overall usage, while Apple's Safari seems to have been left behind, at least on Windows.

The most popular new application of 2008 has been instant messaging client Digsby, with steady growth throughout the course of the year. Games such as Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, and Trackmania have all shown positive growth, though primarily at the time of their release, with growth cooling off rapidly thereafter.

Mac

Once again, we see browsers Firefox and Safari leading the way on the Mac, closely followed by instant messaging client Adium. iTunes is a surprising miss on the most-used applications list for Windows (in fact, no media player made it); however, on OS X, iTunes is the platform's most popular media player, landing in fourth place on the list. VLC and QuickTime follow in a respectable 6th and 7th place.

Mail, the Mac's email client, remains popular in 5th place, impressive considering the rapid growth of web-based email clients such as Gmail. The one common application on both the Windows and Mac lists is World of Warcraft; clearly the game is both "a Mac and a PC."

In terms of new apps, the Mac welcomed a host of wonderful applications in 2008. Desktop media player Plex has shown impressive uptake, closely followed by the Pro-Tweeters Twitter client Tweetdeck. Although still in private beta, cross-platform media player Boxee has seen superb success thus far, and that looks set to continue upon its public release in early 2009. Other newcomers include social browser Cruz and recently released social media tool Eventbox, both very creative social applications in their own rights.

Mac vs. PC

There are a number of notable differences in usage between Mac and PC applications. First, the exclusion of any web development tools from the Windows list could highlight web developers' preferences for other platforms: OS X and Linux. The most notable absentees on the Mac list are word processors and desktop publishing tools; however, TextMate and Adobe Photoshop's appearance corroborates the general preference among creatives for the Mac as a platform.

Another difference is the number of media players on the Mac list, yet not a single mention of one on the PC's -- perhaps further indication that the PC is used primarily for its enterprise and office applications. It's also interesting to see the iPhone Simulator make an appearance on the top 10 newcomers list for the Mac, yet no mention on Windows. Evidently, Mac users are the iPhone's primary source of developers.

Web

The top ten most-used web-based applications are no surprise. Facebook ranks highest, beating heavyweights Gmail, Google Search, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Gmail is the only web-based email client to make the top ten list, highlighting its popularity over other web-based email services, particularly among early adopters and tech-minded individuals. The most significant appearance on the web's most-used list is FriendFeed, ranking higher than both MySpace and Flickr; clearly 2008 has been a great year for FriendFeed.

Summary

The biggest cross-platform winners come from the online gaming sector, with Spore and World of Warcraft both showing incredible growth and sustainability. While clearly it's no surprise that Mozilla's Firefox leads the desktop applications on both platforms, rival browser Chrome is likely to show strong growth, especially once Linux and OS X versions of the browser are released.

Online, Facebook usage reigns supreme. The social network's user engagement levels are astonishing. With 2.6 billion minutes spent on Facebook each day, over 50% of users logging in daily, and 140 million active users, it's easy to see why Facebook is Wakoopa's most-used web application. However, despite Facebook's ranking at number 1, it is Google that should be crowned overall online leader, with four of the top five most-used applications on the web.

In the call we discussed the highlights of 2008: the top Web companies, the biggest technology trends - including an especially good conversation on open versus closed systems - and finally some predictions for 2009. We also touched on some of the 2008 in Review posts we've published in December:

• Top 100 Products of 2008
• Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
• Best BigCo of 2008: Apple

We look forward to doing more RWW Live shows in 2009!

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

So check out our predictions for '08 and please contribute your own in the comments. Also you may want to review our track record for 2007 Web predictions.

1. Semantic Apps will become popular in 2008, due to their ability to get better content results and make better data connections. Think search engines like Hakia and Powerset, wikipedia-like efforts like Twine and Freebase, and apps that use semantic technologies under the hood (such as AdaptiveBlue and Snap).

2. In tandem with #1, Google will experiment more with Semantic Apps in '08. The Knols project, although not overly semantic, is a hint of this direction.

3. Web Services platforms will be a fierce battleground in '08, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and others competing to provide 'Web OS' and online storage to consumers. Unfortunately this may spell the end of a number of startups in this space.

4. Zoho and/or ThinkFree will be acquired by big companies wanting to leapfrog into the Web Office space.

5. The online advertising market will consolidate, after the spate of acquisitions in 2007. CPM will continue to dominate for media brands and CPC for niche sites, although there will be experimentation in VRM and other forms of highly specific targeting of ads. Privacy issues will prevent the latter from becoming mainstream though. The much-hyped CPA (Cost per Action) will continue to be a pipe dream, because publishers simply don't want it.

6. The big Internet companies will surprise us all by embracing open standards, and attempting to compete with each other with features instead of data lock-in (OK, this could just be wishful thinking!).

7. The most interesting innovations on the Web in 2008 won't happen in Silicon Valley, but in Asia (China, Japan, Korea). At least one startup from China will break through in the US market with Twitter-like success in 2008 - and it will almost certainly be a Mobile Web app.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Lead Writer, ReadWriteWeb:

1. Twitter will be acquired.

2. Most ad networks will start producing their own content to advertise against; and some content companies today will get acquired by ad networks.

3. Online video will become so ubiquitous, including live and mobile, that everyone will wonder how the internet existed without it. It won't feel like a big deal, though.

4. A handful of big companies will let you start logging in with an OpenID associated with your account.

5. The value of recommendation engines will become all the more clear; the era of data will be celebrated.

6. People will rebel against Google, at least a little bit. Maybe.

7. People engaged in the new web will do some really awesome stuff that we'll all be in awe of.

Josh Catone, Lead Writer, ReadWriteWeb:

1. Tumblr will be acquired.

2. Privacy will be a growing concern in the mainstream, but ultimately people won't really take any action and for the most part, things won't change. Some companies and groups (think Mozilla) will push for better privacy controls for users, while others (think Facebook) will continue to push the envelope and continue down a slippery slope. Users will eventually push back, but I am hesitant to say that proverbial "straw that breaks the camel's back" will come in 2008.

3. OpenID will be adopted by more startups and larger web companies, but most people (mainstream users) still won't use it - that's a couple of years off.

4. Facebook will continue to grow and their platform will be adopted by other large social networks. Google will sweat.

5. Mobile web usage will be a big story in 2008. It's already big in many parts of the world; and Westerners are about to get hooked. With new mobile devices that makes web surfing less painful, people will be more and more connected away from their computers.

6. Mainstream media coverage will be a catalyst for the adoption of Web Office apps by consumers; and Microsoft will eventually be forced to change their Web Office strategy and offer a fully online office suite (but that latter won't happen in 2008). Offline mode (Gears, AIR, Silverlight, etc.) will be what really tips the scales and causes mainstream users to to embrace the as-of-yet unfamiliar world of Web Office applications.

Alex Iskold, Feature Writer, ReadWriteWeb:

1. 2008 will be slow and cautious, with the first half dominated by recession or fear of recession.

2. Facebook is going to see the same kind of decline in popularity in 2008 that MySpace saw in 2007.

3. Digg is going to be acquired by one of the mainstream media conglomerates.

4. Implicit applications, which monitor our habits and automatically infer our likes, will rise.

Emre Sokullu, Feature Writer, ReadWriteWeb

1. Facebook will acquire companies that do the following, in order to strengthen their advertising unit: personalization, behavior tracking, image recognition (Riya?)

2. Facebook will release a browser.

3. However, despite all that... Facebook will decline.

4. Google OpenSocial will be a failure; Google will try to create its own social networking empire by making acquisitions in this space.

5. Microsoft will become more aggresive and buy many popular companies at once (remember Ballmer's quote). Candidates include SixApart, Technorati.

Sean Ammirati, Editor, ReadWriteTalk (our podcast show):

1. Google will really start looking vulnerable in 2008. While the 'one trick pony' comment by Steve Ballmer drew sarcastic responses, this will begin to look prophetic. While they'll maintain market share in the search industry, the lack of traction in any other of their other initiatives will start to cause frustration. Plus, they will increasingly be perceived as the 'evil' company in many of these new initiatives.

2. Closely related, Yahoo's Hack strategy (see ReadWriteTalk's podcast with Bradley Horowitz) will start to bear fruit and things will look much more optimistic in Sunnyvale this year.

3. Facebook will start to feel pressure from two trends that will emerge on the web: distributed social networks and distributed commerce systems. For distributed commerce systems, look to see a first proof of concept from the VRM project. Chris Messina's diso project with Wordpress will be a great proof of concept for distributed social neworks.

4. Non-search advertising on the web will increase in value significantly. This will be done through a lot of innovation in the ad targeting systems (both behavioral and contextual) and new metrics being adopted by Madison Ave beyond CPC and CPM.

5. There will be a lot of innovation in the hyper-local space, putting the final nail in the newspaper industry's coffin. This will include companies like Outside.in and Yelp moving toward widespread use and new web properties (from both startups and big Internet Cos) emerging.

6. Finally, a 3G iPhone! OK, I don't know if this is a prediction, but I really really want it to be true :)

Charles Knight, Editor, AltSearchEngines (RWW network blog)

1. In the 1st Q 2008, the true "Google Killer" in search will be in Stealth Mode. In 2nd Q 2008 the first prototype will begin in closed Alpha mode. In 3rd Q 2008 it will be ready for the final closed Beta testing. In 4th Q 2008 it will launch and "Rock and Shock" the world!

2. The classic Vertical Search Engines (Job Search, Health, Consumer Electronics, Shopping, Video, People, more...) will continue their dominance over all other Search Engines in their various niches.

3. The Alternative Search Engines will pick up the pace of partnerships and cooperation, for their solid mutual benefit.

4. Mainstream Media interest in the Alts will increase until it begins to rival coverage of the five major search engines.

5. The trend towards 'widgetization' of the Alts will continue. Approximately 2 in 10 Alternative Search Engines (20%) have widgets now, and that number will double in 2008 to 4 in 10 or 40%.

Conclusion

Now it's time for you to tell us your Web predictions for 2008. Please leave a comment or trackback below!

Crystal Ball image by Blue Cubic Electron Syncrony, via Flickr