ReadWriteWeb

I took a business trip recently, and it was a big deal. Even if it was nothing major for anyone else, it was a big deal for me. The trip was full of promise and opportunity. I made sure to capture all its key moments with my phone. When I got back, I didn't want to stick all those photos into a bland, blue Facebook album.

I used Jux, because it lets me design the whole experience out to every edge of every screen. Jux just launched crop control for photos, so the Jux album of my trip looks just right on every device. A Jux isn't a blog. It's more like a portfolio. Each piece stands on its own.

Our annual Best Of series continues with the top 10 Web products that revolutionized old services and created new ones this year. Yesterday, Richard MacManus rounded up the top 10 social Web products, featuring services that focus on social networking and community building. This round-up is about the Web products that changed the things we do online.

The categories vary here from browsers to cloud drives to mobile apps and more. But all of these services redefined a core use case for the Web, and some of them invented activities we didn't know we needed. Here are our top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011:

Trapit, a personalized tool for discovering Web articles, opens to the public today. Trapit crawls roughly 100,000 sites, adding more sources every week, to provide users with the most relevant content from deep within the Web, not just the popular or SEO-spammy results. It's built on the same AI technology as Apple's Siri, which means it learns what interests you and gives you better suggestions over time.

You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

Jux, the boldest, loudest big-screen personal publishing platform around, has just made its natural leap to the iPad. As of today, the multimedia publishing platform that launched in August now supports touch-powered browsing. It's iPad-optimized, but all it needs is a tablet browser. Just go to jux.com and dive in.

When I covered Jux's desktop launch, I called it "post-blogging." I intended some irony then, but now that I've touched Jux on an iPad, I take it seriously. Very seriously. The experience is continuous between the desktop and the tablet. For all its media-heavy intensity, Jux is a responsive design. This is no boring WordPress Onswipe theme for a blog. This is the publisher coming to life through every screen.

Thoora, your robot buddy for exploring and sharing topics on the Web, is coming to Android tablets, and maybe even to your new Kindle Fire. Thoora's new app, optimized for Android 3.0, is available in the Android Market now for free. The team plans to submit to the Amazon Appstore after testing on a Kindle Fire, and an iPad version and smartphone apps are coming before the end of the year.

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.

With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

Amazon.com added FOX movie and TV titles through its Prime Membership platform today in a deal that will roughly double the number of available titles to 11,000 by this Fall.

The announcement comes two days before Amazon is expected to launch one of two Kindle tablets to compete with the iPad.

Today, a NYC-based startup called Jux has launched a personal publishing platform that kicks a field goal right over the heads of Tumblr and the post-blogging crowd. It's a big, beautiful, dynamic tool full of splashy images and sharp Web fonts. It offers six kinds of basic posts: BlockQuote, Article, Photo, Video, SlideShow, and CountDown. You start from there and build huge, full-screen posts that suck the viewer in. It's like a blog that can crank out whole About.me or Flavors.me pages for every post. You have to see it to get how powerful it is.

Power, of course, is not everything when it comes to publishing. Jux isn't lean like Posterous or clean like WordPress, whose publishing platform powers nearly 15% of the world's websites. Compared to blog posts that feel more like pages, a Jux post is more like a Times Square billboard. It takes some time to load. There's an animated loading bar between screens, especially when editing. But it's worth the wait. Perusing a Jux profile is like taking a deep dive into someone's ideas.

Rumors have been swirling around Apple and premium video streaming since iTunes introduced the ability to purchase and view video in 2005. Yet, here we are six years later and the content streaming industry has taken off with no streaming vertical from Apple in sight. That may change very soon.

Business Insider is reporting rumors from an analyst at research firm Jefferies that Apple has secret licensing deals in place to launch a video streaming service. Jefferies's Peter Misek reportedly said "...we believe Apple has unannounced deals with all/most of the studios/TV networks." If Misek is correct, Apple's play in the space is either a prelude to a deal with the networks for Hulu or a sign Apple was never really interested in the streaming service in the first place, planning all along to create its own streaming product perhaps to coincide with the release of iCloud. Either way, any premium streaming service from Apple will have huge ripple affects across the industry.

For online marketers and other content creators, the need to optimize one's content for search and social media is now well-known. What's less clear for many is how to go about it. Which keywords are best to use? How frequently should you use them?

It was with these questions in mind that Eightfold Logic created InboundWriter, a new social writing Web app that analyzes the keywords in a given block of written copy and provides feedback about how to more effectively optimize that content for search and social.