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.

Location-based Apps - Foursquare: Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March. Since then it has partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users.

iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire: In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app. Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application.

Real-Time Search - Collecta: If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release, which launched in June. In September the company released its API to developers.

Twitter App Discovery - OneForty: Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store," OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy-to-understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage.

Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10

All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access: Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched its much-anticipated $5-per-month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify.

Web TV - Clicker: Launched in mid November, Clicker is considered the TV Guide for Internet television. The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors.

Semantic Search - Evri: Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections.

Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo: While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July. The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions.

Augmented Reality - Layar: ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June. Created by SPRXmobile, the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July, SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd-party applications.

You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year.

Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users. A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That's a powerful cultural change.

Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data - thanks to Twitter.

Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it's overwhelming but the end result is an experience that brings the dispersed social web back together again.

Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It's got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria - we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking.

PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties - immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on.

Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It's a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web.

Tweetdeck (and Seesmic) are the market's leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit, but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It's in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web.

ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn't be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week's announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset.

The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that's changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that's so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO's research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have.

At the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, he talked to us about how the synaptic web, as he calls it, relies on real-time communication and distributed networking to tie together our communal body of online knowledge. In this interview, Loux talks about the new school of online reputation management, the essence of distributed social networks, and how the synaptic web shapes and heals itself as users collectively contribute to the dataset.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

What's New?

The re-design project was announced on the last.fm blog on 21 May. Its stated mission was "to make online music easier, better and more discoverable." The most noticeable change so far is a new-look UI (more on that below), but here some of the other new features:

• Fully visible library - your entire Last.fm music profile is made visible, "down to every last artist and track."
• Real-time charts - every track you scrobble gets added to all of your charts, instantly.
• Activity feeds
• An improved music player
• Improved sharing
• Podcasts

New look

Mixed Feedback; Visual Design Too Much Like Facebook

Last.fm has been gathering feedback on the re-design in its Last.fm Beta Group and on Get Satisfaction. And according to a recent blog post, they've even done some real world usability tests in London. There's also a Flickr stream if you're not a subscriber and curious to see what the beta looks like. Finally, this MetaFilter discussion has some good feedback.

Initial feedback from last.fm's core user base has been mixed. It's fairly common to receive negative feedback on any new design (boy do I know about that, based on RWW's last re-design!). Here are some of the negative comments about the new design in the Beta Group: "generic and commercial", "the aesthetic is lacking", "boring and old fashioned", "resemble[s] facebook too much", "desperate attempt to create a web2.0-ish design".

More specifically, users seem to be are worried that "the music on the new layout is an after thought, relegated below the profile and library" (ref: LadyParadis). The activity stream reminds some users of Facebook, which at least one thinks is unnecessary - "I personally don't see the need in knowing that The Beatles have recently been tagged 'psychedelic awesomeness'", complained Besame.

My Feedback

The new design is nowhere near as polished as the current design, and it does indeed seem very square and blocky like Facebook. Take a look at the comparison:

Current (old) design

Beta (new) design

Aesthetically, the old design is much more pleasing. It must be said though that the old design was always flawed in terms of navigation -- I remember when I first used last.fm, it was difficult to figure out where to click to actually play music. There always seemed to be just too many features and no easy way to navigate to many of them. Take a look at how many levels of navigation there are - and different ways of expressing links - and you'll see what I mean. The new design tries to remedy that confusion, with a traditional vertical navigation panel. But there are still areas where the nav makes no sense - e.g. 'Events' and 'Charts' are both listed twice, once in the header bar and again in the vertical nav. Yet 'Video' and 'Community', two other header nav items, are not in the vertical nav.

Beyond the design aspects, the beta site still needs to address several key features. Chief among them is finding friends, in order to discover more music. I've tried to find new friends on beta last.fm, to no avail. I clicked furiously around the site, but found no way to a) find friends, and b) add them to my network! The new design seems intent on tapping into some of Facebook's mojo (as well as its design), yet social networking on last.fm remains a painful, if not impossible, experience. This is/was also a problem in the old design. However, this feature is under development in the beta according to some of the holder pages I came across.

But to the positive aspects. The newly expanded Library feature is colorful and promising. It seems to be lacking some detail right now, but this is a beta. The Charts page is great and has a lot of interesting data. You can tell that I've been on a Neil Young bender recently for example:

Conclusion

Overall, there are promising new features in Last.fm Beta. The increased amount of data that is exposed on the new design is the most important - and welcome - new feature. The Activity Feed, which one user above complained about, seems innocuous at worst and vaguely useful at best. Overall it's better to have more data to play with than less, in an online music service at least.

However what will really make the most difference is an enhanced ability to discover new music, which means being able to get better recommendations and befriend people with similar music tastes to you. So far, the beta last.fm provides little in these crucial respects. We're told it's coming, but when? Until these recommendation and social features arrive, I'll stick with the old last.fm.

If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception.

One of the Microsoft Server products that businesses worldwide run is SharePoint. For those not from the I.T. community, SharePoint is thought of as a more robust version of Google Sites, but that's a poor comparison. Yes, both tools allow for team site creation and collaboration, however the similarities start and stop there.

For many companies, SharePoint is the portal for all their business data - and not just docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, but also browser-based forms that interact with built-in workflow technologies which add business logic to sophisticated online applications.

Other tools allow for the addition of business intelligence enabled dashboards and reporting centers, enterprise search, and application templates that can be downloaded and customized to quickly set up internal web sites and services that provide everything from online help desks, to groupboard workspaces, to knowledge libraries, vacation scheduling tools, project tracking workspaces, sales pipelines, and much more.

In other words, businesses won't necessarily be ditching SharePoint anytime soon just to run the latest and greatest "Enterprise 2.0" technologies. However, that doesn't mean they're not interested in running Enterprise 2.0 apps - it just means that they'll be more likely to "maximize their investment" in SharePoint in order to do so.

This week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, several vendors are demonstrating their social-computing business tools, and a good many of them are tools that integrate with SharePoint technologies. Here's a look at who these companies are and what they offer:

Awareness Inc.

Just yesterday, Awareness announced their new platform that allows for the creation of Web 2.0 communities that connect people and content through social networking technologies and Awareness-powered widgets that can be ported to any third-party services from Facebook to MySpace.

With the new platform from Awareness, Microsoft SharePoint integration is built-in, letting I.T. admins use SharePoint's scalable and searchable back end to tie together internally-facing SharePoint environments with externally-facing social networking/Web 2.0 communities.

This integration also includes the packaging of Awareness's Web 2.0 widgets as SharePoint Web Parts that let users monitor and contribute content, display user details and status, search content, and view metrics. Awareness also integrates with SharePoint's Identity Management to allow for SSO (single sign-on), which makes using both platforms together a seamless experience.

NewsGator Technologies

Yesterday, NewsGator announced the launch of their new SharePoint add-on, Social Sites 2.0. This tool brings new social capabilities to SharePoint Server 2007 including community pages, which are ad hoc communities formed around projects, interests, or locations, and social networking capabilities that let employees better collaborate and share knowledge. Social Sites also includes tools for tagging, search, customized recommendations, and a discussion component that includes email integration. Users are provided with social graphs based on both explicit and implied connections, making it easier for them to find their colleagues and content in an easier way than before.

Atlassian

Atlassian, makers of Confluence, an enterprise wiki creation tool, announced its integration with SharePoint through an embedding function that lets the Confluence wiki appear to be a part of the SharePoint site, complete with an edit button for making changes. The wiki lets users add charts, diagrams, image galleries, maps and database content within their pages.

WorkLight Inc.

Yesterday, WorkLight announced its new WorkLight for SharePoint, which lets SharePoint Server users securely view and update information from SharePoint Server through familiar consumer tools like Windows Vista gadgets, Facebook applications, personalized homepage gadgets, RSS, mobile devices, and more.

blueKiwi Software

Last month, blueKiwi Software announced their integration with both Microsoft Office and SharePoint. With their new SharePoint connector and blueKiwi OfficeAssistant, their social software suite easily integrates with a company's SharePoint Server to provide social networking tools and capabilities that include blogging, user profiles, conversation trackers, tagging, social search, and more.

Connectbeam

Yesterday, Connectbeam announced their new Spotlight Connect for SharePoint, a bookmarking and tagging add-on module for their enterprise social search-and-discovery application that brings social content, collaboration, and bookmarking tools into SharePoint via a special add-on module available this July.

Telligent Systems

Telligent's Community Server Evolution platform uses its REST API, mail gateway, shared authentication and single sign-on, to integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Active Directory. Their social-computing platform offers enterprise blogging tools, social networking, social streams, forums, media galleries, and business analytics through detailed reporting.

Leverage Software

Leverage Software announced integration with SharePoint Server, enabling users to interact with external-facing internet communities of their partners, customers, or corporate alumni, while maintaining the security needs of an enterprise.

Tomoye Corp.

Tomoye's Ecco software, which lets you get answers, network, and collaborate across the enterprise, is now offering a SharePoint-ready solution. This capability lets users publish documents from SharePoint to Ecco and supports SSO between applications.