This is the seventh in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
6. Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008

Finance

Mint

Mint single-handedly changed the market for personal finance tools on the Internet in 2008 and forced Quicken, its closest competitor, to start offering its own online tools for free as well. Mint aggregates personal finance data from across the web and displays a consolidated view of all of your accounts in a very well designed and easy to use user interface. Mint also uses this data to recommend better credit cards and savings accounts to its users.

Mint launched its beta program in late 2007 and came out of beta in October 2008.  By October, Mint already had close to half a million users and had managed over $12 billion in transactions. In the course of 2008, Mint added a substantial number of new features to its lineup, including the ability to get an overview of your investment accounts. Mint also launched a major redesign of its user interface in August.

Rudder

While Rudder might look similar to Mint at first, this personal finance tool has a very different focus. While Rudder also aggregates your banking and credit card accounts, it does not focus on analyzing your past spending habits in the way Mint does. Instead, its focuse is on the letting you know how much money you still have to pay your monthly bills. One of the great advantages of Rudder is that it sends all your updates to your inbox, so that you don't even have to log in to the service to keep up to date.

Rudder debuted at this year's DEMOfall conference in San Diego and, given the current economic situation, couldn't have launched at a more opportune time. Rudder also features a large number of useful finance planning tools and a great mobile site.

Health

PatientsLikeMe

PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Multiple Sclerosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Fibromyalgia. Even though the site is still relatively now, it already provides on of the largest patient communities, and also features a wide range of research tools for symptoms and treatments.

PatientsLikeMe was founded in 2004 and defines its mission as providing a platform for sharing real world medical data. Members of the site often share data about their individual health experiences like symptoms, weight, mood swings, or drugs they have taken. Thanks to this, you can easily find others who are in the same situation as you and see what treatments are working for them.

Earlier this year, we named PatiensLikeMe as one of our favorite Web 2.0 health apps.

Sermo

Our second top health app is also a social network, but this time for physicians. Sermo has over 90,000 members who exchange information about both medical and non-medical issues. As Matthew Holt from the Health Care Blog pointed out to us, the site also features some highly sophisticated survey and ratings tools, though it is only open to registered physicians.

This year, Sermo also rolled out a partnership with Bloomberg that provides healthcare investors with access to medical information compiled by the site's members.

Education

TeachStreet

TeachStreet is not an educational site in the traditional sense. Instead, it provides a marketplace for teachers and students to meet. TeachStreet, whose motto is 'Learn New Things,' focuses mostly on teaching adults anything from arts and crafts, to bagpiping and foreign languages. TeachStreet started out in Seattle, WA, but expanded to Portland, OR and the Bay Area this year. The site already lists over 60,000 different classes and instructors.

TeachStreet is an interesting tool, both for teachers to gain more visibility, and for students to find the right classes and teachers. Thanks to its excellent search functions and well-designed layout, TeachStreet has already made a name for itself in the regions where it has officially launched and is poised for more growth in 2009.

After the jump: Politics, Non-Profits, Travel

Politics

OpenCongress

While the U.S. election surely dominated the news this year, one non-election related web app that we really came to appreciate this year was OpenCongress. OpenCongress is a project by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation and is definitely a must for political junkies. The site tracks all the news and votes in the U.S. Congress through an easy to use interface that features a lot of AJAX and RSS. The site even supports OpenID and also provides its users with a large number of widgets they can implement on their own sites.

As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out in his review of the site, it makes users "want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling."

Non-Profits

Kiva

Kiva is a micro-lending service that was founded in 2005 and at that time, it was the first person-to-person micro-ending site on the net. Kiva allows its users to lend small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing nations. The loans typically go towards starting up or expanding small, local businesses, ranging from a motorcycle repair shop in Lebanon to tailors in Pakistan.

In November, Kiva announced that over $50 million have now been lend by Kiva's over 330,000 members. This is a major success for the organization, especially given that Kiva had only loaned $11 million by September 2007. Kiva also ran a successful billboard campaign in California thanks to the help of PayPal.

The current financial crisis is obviously affecting Kiva and the organization is already seeing fewer lenders. Hopefully, this trend will reverse in 2009.

Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot provides software-as-a-service solutions to small and medium sized associations, clubs, and non-profits. It has created tightly integrated solutions for membership management, event registration, and creating customized web sites, with a focus on the non-profit sector. Service plans range from free to a flat fee of $200 a month, depending on the size of the contact database you plan to manage on the service.

In 2008, Wild Apricot rolled out a number of updates to its software, including support for Google Checkout, custom URLs, and better group management. Currently, Wild Apricot has more than 10,000 non-profit organizations as clients. We also like the company's well-written and informative blog about technology for non-profits.

Disclosure: Wild Apricot is a RWW sponsor.

Travel

Yapta

The web clearly revolutionized the travel industry. Booking flights and vacations online has quickly become a routine activity, even for less savvy web users. While Yapta launched in 2006, it was really only in 2008 that the site was able to differentiate itself from larger competitors like Kayak, FareCompare,  or Farecast. In June, Yapta announced a new feature that allows you to track airfare changes, and in November, Yapta unveiled a unique service that also allows you to track when and where you can use you frequent flier miles to book a flight.

While it's probably best to take this data with a grain of salt, Yapta claims to have saved its users over $91 million in airfare since May 2007.

PlanetEye

PlanetEye is a social travel site with a strong focus on providing both user-generated content, as well as stories from local editors all over the world. One of the core features of PlanetEye are its Travel Packs, which let you clip content from the site while you are planning your trip. This allows you to easily create your own personalized travel guides. PlanetEye came out of beta in the middle of 2008 and has already managed to established a loyal community of users on its service. PlanetEye also partnered with Travelocity, OpenTable, and StubHub.

Besides giving you great info for planning your trip, PlanetEye also lets you share geotagged photos with the rest of the PlanetEye community. The highlight of the service, however, is the content added by PlanetEye's local experts which ranges from blog posts to reviews of restaurants and local sights.

That's our list of 'real world' web apps that we think have made a difference to mainstream people in 2008. Let us know in the comments what your favorites are.

That the Red Cross is using social media sharing sites like Utterz, Flickr, and YouTube (they even have a Twitter account) is not surprising. We reported in April on a study that appeared in New Scientist magazine that found that social media sites, blogs, and instant messaging services are better at connecting people and providing warnings during emergencies than traditional sources of such information.

During last fall's California wildfires, for example, the best source of breaking information was a combination of Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, and other tools of citizen journalists. As the fires continued to rage out of control, media poured into CNN's i-Report section, which collects user submitted news photos and videos, and the value of citizen journalism became so apparent that the company eventually spun i-Report off as a standalone web site.

"The real contribution of citizen journalists in a story like this, where whole areas of land are closed off and the fields of greatest danger keep shifting, is in having more eyes on the ground," Thomas Hollihan, a professor of media at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, told the Baltimore Sun. "Citizen journalists are swapping information back and forth - reporting where the flames are now headed or showing images on their cell phones of the fire. And with so much happening so quickly, that kind of information can be really powerful - if it is accurate."

Last spring, when tragedy struck Virginia Tech University, the "I'm ok at VT" group on Facebook famously connected students with families and friends. Hundreds of other support groups, blogs, and web site sprung up on social networking sites and around the web as a way to connect students and help them through troubling times. The Red Cross operates a similar site for connecting disaster survivors with friends and family.

From disaster relief and other non-governmental organizations to citizen journalists and the mainstream media, web 2.0 and mobile technology is being used to connect, inform, and mobilize people during disasters.

Mobile technology is most likely to be used in Asia or Africa, where wired infrastructure is less common. Indeed, seven of the eleven case studies included with the report detailed mobile use among organizations working in African nations.

"Well over 3.5 billion mobile phones are in use around the world and organizations are harnessing this technology to help overcome humanitarian challenges," said Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation in a press release. "Modern telecommunications, and the creative use of it, has the power to change lives and help the UN solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. It can connect families separated by disaster, help emergency relief workers respond more quickly, empower health workers with data to help combat disease and epidemics, track the impacts of climate change, and even help in the resolution of civil conflicts."

By far the most common use of technology is voice, followed by text messages. But more sophisticated uses such as photo and video messaging, mapping, data collection and analysis, and inventory management are on the rise. NGOs said that the use of mobile devices has allowed them to save time, transmit data more quickly and accurately, more quickly mobilize individuals, gather data, and reach audiences that were previously unreachable.

The case studies cover the areas of public health (such as connecting health workers to one another in Uganda), humanitarian assistance (such as alerting Iraqi refugees to food aid drop offs in Syria), and environmental conservation (such as using text messages to raise awareness about deforestation in Argentina). The entire report is available for download in PDF format from the UN Foundation web site.

"The main theme that jumped out at us is that major donors -- or the wired wealthy as we call them -- are very active online with the intention of becoming even more so when it comes to their philanthropic support," said Vinay Bhagat, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Convio in a press release. "Based on what these important donors told us, we believe a tremendous opportunity exists for nonprofit organizations to better leverage their online presence to improve the online experience of the wired wealthy."

Convio, Edge, and Sea Change expect that the results of their research will change the way some charities approach online fundraising. Specifically, they found that more than half of those surveyed preferred giving online, and 80% said they did at least some of their donating via the Internet (and a good portion do it via credit card to get the frequent flier miles). That's imporant because even though the "wired wealthy" made up just about 1% of donors to the charities involved in the study, they accounted for approximately 32% of their annual gifts.

Unfortunately for charities, less than half of respondents thought charity web sites were generally well-designed, that charities did enough to connect with them online, or that they were inspired by charity sites. So how can organizations better connect with these important constituents? Email is one method. According to the study, 65% of the "wired wealthy" always open email sent from charities they support, and about 3/4ths of respondents said that email reminders about the renewal of an annual gift are "appropriate." But just 43% thought emails from charities were usually well-written or inspiring, indicating that thus far email has been a lost opportunity for many non-profit organizations. Further, a large majority of respondents said an email letting them know how their donation was spent would make they more likely to give again, as would controls on how often a charity was allowed to email them.

More than half of respondents also use YouTube, which points to online video as another pontential way to connnect with wealthy donors online.

"We believe this research will fundamentally shift the way some nonprofit organizations approach their relationships with major donors online," said Mark Rovner, Principal of Sea Change Strategies.

The study revealed three distinct personality types among the "wired wealthy."

• 29% are Relationship Seekers - Relationship seekers put the most stock in how a charity web site forms a connection with them. They tend to skew younger (under 45) and are most likely to engage in social activities with the charity. 2/3rds of relationship seekers say that a charity's web site plays a role in whether or not they give money.
• 41% are Casual Connectors - Like relationship seekers, so-called casual connectors also seek a connection with the charity. However, for them it is less personal -- they're more interested in things like how efficiently the charity is using their money and want easy access to that information.
• 30% are All Business - The all business set doesn't care about feeling connected to the charity, rather they want the donation process to be as easy and painless as possible. They also tend give the most money.

It certainly seems possible to appeal to each of those personality types via a single web site, which is exactly what the authors of the study hope will happen. "The research provides important insight into the ways non-profits can better connect, motivate and retain these donors. The results of this research will provide a variety of different non-profit organizations -- both large and small -- the tools to assess their online strategy and make adjustments where necessary to better capture big opportunities," said Rovnar.

In September, we wondered if the web was still a windfall for non-profits. With online donations up 37% in 2006 according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, it is clear that the web, if not yet the main point for charitable donation, is playing an increasingly more important role. As part of that online fundraising strategy, targeting the "wired wealthy" is something that charities should be taking into account.