ReadWriteWeb

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

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

Last year, when we looked at the top real-time Web products of 2009, we predicted that in 2010 the real-time Web was "likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world". Indeed, as we look back on the last year we find that many of the big innovations in terms of the real-time Web come in the form of implementations by companies like Google and Facebook. At the same time, there are still smaller players in the realm that have changed how (and how fast) we expect information on the Web to move and people interact.

Just a year after companies like Facebook started offering a constantly updated stream of real-time content, we expect no less from nearly any site we visit and soon enough, calling something "real-time" will be like identifying something as "social". With that in mind, let's take a look at the top 10 products, innovations and developments in the world of the real-time Web in 2010.

Every week we see more new tools and updates to existing products than we have time to write about. But here are a few product updates that are worth your attention, briefly noted: Google is upping its limits on shared contacts, Zendesk is adding Twitter monitoring, Kapow has a new flagship product - and more!

Springpad, a rival to Evernote's popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it's a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn't want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant.

Is there any business Google doesn't want to be in? Despite the fact that there are already plenty of excellent mobile shopping applications for the Android smartphone operating system, Google has decided to launch their own. Via an announcement on the Google Mobile blog, we're introduced to the search giant's latest creation: Google Shopper. If you're at all familiar with mobile shopping applications, then you can probably guess what this app does. It scans barcodes and retrieves prices. It can also find product information using photos snapped with your phone's camera. You can do voice searches, too. Apparently, Google didn't want to make just another mobile shopping app, they wanted to make a better one. 

Are you ready to move your documents in to the cloud? Knowledge Tree has released the new SaaS version of its document management software, dubbed KnowledgeTreeLive. Knowledge Tree is an open source commercial vendor, with both a community edition under the GPL and a proprietary enterprise version.

The new subscription-based KnowledgeTreeLive is hosted on Amazon EC2. It has all the features of the on-premise version of the software, but also includes integration with the Zoho Office Suite for a fully cloud-based approach.

Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing earlier this month and one of its great new features is a video search tool called called Smart Motion Previews. It's a preview feature that let you view and listen to part of a video by hovering over it with your mouse.

This is all fine and dandy, but when it was discovered that it worked for porn site previews also, and that it could be easily accessed by kids, it caused quite a bit of concern among parents. Bing had noted on its blog how to use Smart Motion Previews in combination with its SafeSearch feature, but apparently it was still very easy for kids to view explicit adult content on its site. Yesterday Microsoft announced that it has made changes that will make it easier for parents to block and monitor what their kids are watching when they visit Bing.

For the final RWW Live show of the year today, the ReadWriteWeb writers and a couple of special guests got together to review the year in Web technology. Joining host Sean Ammirati were Marshall Kirkpatrick, Sarah Perez and Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb. We had two special guests who joined the call while we were live: Allen Stern of Center Networks and Kevin Marks of Google. Thanks to both of them for jumping in at the last minute. Here is the audio recording of the show: