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As mentioned last week on Google's blog, this fall the company will shut down a series of services, including Aardvark, Desktop, Notebook, Web Security (the original Postini technology) and others less well known. Jeff Reeves at Smart Money magazine has even suggested spinning off several divisions to give Google more focus, and giving employees an incentive for some of its far-out ideas.

Real-time social Question and Answer service Quora has opened to the public after months of high-profile development in closed beta. The service was started by a group of early Facebook employees, most notably Facebook's first CTO Adam D'Angelo. It's a beautifully designed site but is entering a very crowded Q&A market.

The company has raised millions of dollars in venture capital, at a very high valuation, and is rumored to be in a nasty spat behind the scenes with Facebook leadership. It's also been a great place to get inside dirt on Silicon Valley startups. Ready to take a peak inside? The site is open to new users today.

It's not every day you get the chance to hear a half dozen executives from successful startups speak openly about how their companies managed to get to where they are. In fact, its most likely that to get that kind of access in one day, you'd have to be at some high-priced convention that costs several hundred dollars to attend. This isn't the case, however, with Starter Day, an event hosted by software makers Atlassian that will showcase six CEOs and founders from various startups, including Boxee, Aardvark and Pandora.

"It's not about the value of the task, it's about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore." That's how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands, his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee.

Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person.

The big news from earlier this week was the announcement that Google would be acquiring online photo editing service Picnik for an undisclosed amount. This marks Google's third acquisition of 2010 after buying Aardvark and reMail in February suggesting that the company could be going on an extended shopping spree much like in 2007 when it picked up 16 separate companies. Merger and acquisition (M&A) spending has floundered among tech companies in the last few years, but Google's early purchases this year could signal a return of this kind of spending.

One day in December I was visiting family and picked up my niece Xander from daycare. We had to leave before her balloon got turned into an animal. It was disappointing. So when we got back to her house, I pulled out my iPhone and showed her an app called Aardvark. We asked Aardvark how we could turn one long balloon into a balloon animal. My niece jumped up and down with excitement every time we got an iPhone push notification that someone out on the internet had an answer to offer. The first 3 people said "draw eyes on it and call it a snake." That was funny the first time. Then, someone came through with a great link to good instructions for making a balloon animal. We made one, we were happy and proud, and we'd become the kind of people who knew how to make balloon animals.

A month later, Xander was visiting my house and we gave her a package of balloons. She whipped up a giraffe, a horse and a princess crown in minutes. Her mom asked her how she did it and you know what she said? "The Aardvark taught me how to do it!" Google announced today that it bought the company that made that iPhone app. It feels like some closure on my past year of hunting the story of the Aardvark, both personally and professionally.

Earlier this morning, we heard rumors that Google was in the process of acquiring Q&A service Aardvark for around $50 million. Aardvark, which was founded by ex-Google employees, was one of our favorite Web services of 2010, but the company still remains relatively small.

It's been almost a year since I last worked with DIY repair site FixYa but I still remember the traffic spike we'd see every Christmas. While families would be thrilled to unwrap smart phones, netbooks and flat screen monitors in the early morning, they'd find themselves lost in a sea of instructions by noon. There is nothing worse than having a new shiny toy and not being able to play with it. In addition to FixYa, below are a few resources you can use to help set up your new gadgets.

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups.

The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following 10 have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem.

The real-time web was hot this year and it's likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We've tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed.