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What happened to startups in 2011? E-commerce and mobile payments continued to grow, and group buying startup Groupon went public. Facebook, the biggest social network around, expanded in a huge way, announcing Timeline, frictionless sharing and a settlement (finally) with the FTC. It also swallowed up many promising startups, including group messaging service Beluga, social network-enhancing service Friend.ly and software company WhoGlue.

The mixing of social gaming and mobile payments, social network alternatives to Facebook, consumer cloud storage and apps that actually make you feel productive (read: not like you're just wasting more time online) came out on top as just a few of the most important startups of this year.

This year's top 10 startups list is a combination of companies that launched in 2011, and others that gained considerable attention. We chose these startups based on how they've changed or disrupted their niches and how they've influenced trends this year and for the year to come. They are listed in no particular order. Take a look after the jump.

SCVNGR, by its nature, is a social-based location game. It has partnerships with brands and universities, but, as CEO Seth Priebatsch will admit, it does not inherently lead to sales at the register. Location-based social game mechanics are not inherently transactional. That is where the company's newest product, LevelUp comes into play. Take merchant offers, location, game mechanics and make then transactional and you have an idea what LevelUp is trying to do in the mobile payments space.

SCVNGR takes a lot of heat for not having a direction. Yesterday article on SCVNGR's "path" got some sneers from the Boston startup community because the "path" is apparently that there is no path. LevelUp is the path and it dives deep into the fundamental nature of payments, merchants and how people interact with money.

Where is the mobile payments capital of the United States? Salt Lake City has groundswell as a test city of a variety of platforms. The big cities and tech hubs like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston and Portland, Ore. have a growing interest by brands and retailers. Yet, what if we told you that Des Moines, Iowa may be the U.S. leader in mobile payments? It may be true.

Des Moines is the home of mobile payments platform Dwolla. It is an interesting case study - local startup creating buzz within the community and getting retailers and consumers to actually use the platform. Dwolla has created a mobile payments ecosystem from the bottom up. Could this be a model that the top-down brands like the financial institutions, tech giants and payments experts could follow to success?

Online and mobile cash-based payment service Dwolla has launched its first API (application programming interface), which the company calls "Grid." This tool allows for the integration of Dwolla's cash-based payments service within other platforms and applications. The operation works somewhat like a Facebook Connect for payments - instead of merchants holding your personal data on their servers, that sensitive information is stored within Dwolla. How much of your data they can access is up to you, the consumer. The benefit here is that with less access to this data, there's less risk of fraud.