ReadWriteWeb

We live in a technologically rich and increasingly Web-savvy world. In this post, we celebrate the World Wide Web by selecting our top 10 international products of 2008. What do we mean by 'international'? We looked for products that were developed outside the U.S., which showed innovation and support for global Web standards. We also tried to choose from a cross-section of countries, although obviously we couldn't cover all the major countries. That said, we hope you enjoy our selections!

There's a new aggregator in town folks. If you're a fan of Dave Winer's political NewsJunk aggregation site, Techmeme, or FriendFeed, then you're going to love Winer's counterpart to the political NewsJunk site, Tech NewsJunk. Created because Winer wasn't getting enough news about products, Tech Newsjunk is the latest product review aggregator to hit the market.

Finding the right apartment to live in can be a daunting and time consuming task. Introin tries to make this process easier by creating a platform where prospective renters can communicate with current residents. Current residents can earn referral bonuses from their rental complex when they convince a prospective renter to move to their complex. Introit also gives renters the opportunity to advertise their own apartments for subleasing.

We weren't kidding when we said Wikis are now serious business. For music, WikiAudio is providing a new way to educated music fanatics. While music fans visit sites like Last.fm, Imeem, and Myspace for their music fix, musicians and producers can head over to one of the largest and most comprehensive audio wiki's ever.

Swotti is a new semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. With Swotti, you can learn from the good and bad experiences of others as the site gathers together reviews and feedback from across the web and categorizes them to provide you with more information about the product you're interested in. What's unique about this search engine is that it uses semantics to do so.

The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user. The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search using "normal" search engine.

Xobni (that's inbox backwards - cute!) is the next big idea in productivity enhancements for your inbox. The Xobni software is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that offers email management and quick access to important information in your email. But more than that, Xobni claims to "expose the hidden social network" in your email. That's ingenious because everyone I know is in my email...somehow, somewhere...but they may or may not be my friend on MySpace, Facebook, flickr, YouTube, etc. This is especially true for my family members over 40!

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb has just received 50 beta accounts to Xobni. Enter the invite code “RWW” at www.xobni.com/download to get instant access to the download of Xobni Insight.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Highlights this week: Richard MacManus ended 2007 with a review of the top 10 Web Tech stories of the year. Marshall Kirkpatrick produced an awesome toolkit to keep track of Web Tech trends in 2008; he also showed how to fall in love with tagging again and asked some big questions on privacy in the Web age. Josh Catone offered a guide to Online Giving to start the new year and he explored how the Web is affecting the US presidential primaries.