ReadWriteWeb

Burning Man is, in some ways, a virtual world. It's not unlike Second Life: a flat, empty plane onto which creator/participants build a temporary society however they can, making every decision into a work of art. Indeed, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is a longtime Burner himself, and the Burning Man organization now holds an official event there. But there are also stark differences. Burning Man's principles emphasize participation, immediacy and face-to-face encounters. Plus, it's an awfully dusty place to bring your iPad.

Looking back on 2011, it may be remembered as The Year Of Mobile. Sure, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and all the other platforms existed in previous years but historians will look back at 2011 and say that it was the year that the way an entire populace interacts with information fundamentally changed. Mobile is not just for the early adopters anymore. Smartphones are everywhere.

What made waves in the mobile realm this year? We take a look in our third installment of ReadWriteWeb's top products of the year. Our founder Richard MacManus kicked us off with social products and Jon Mitchell took a look at web-based consumer products. To make the mobile list, a product had to be built to fundamentally work inside mobile platforms, hence the platforms themselves (iOS, Android flavors etc.) do not make the list. Take a look at our list below and let us know what we may have missed in the comments.

An app called Path launched its version 2 do-over yesterday. "The smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love," it calls itself now. I ignored this app until today. All I saw from version 1 was emoji spam in my Twitter stream. Let's take it as read that version 1 failed to catch on, hence version 2. How does an app help you "share life with the ones you love?"

The tech "world," or "scene," or whatever it is, is in love with this app. It tingled with excitement when Path went "stealthish" in 2010. It launched later that year weirdly lacking in features, and the blogerati still fawned over it. What is it about Path? How does "love" arise from Objective-C and 3.5 inches of glass? By evoking the people in your life, of course. And Path does that, just as Facebook does. It's a life stream. An ego trip. "Share life with the ones you love," especially yourself.

ThinkUp, the social media management tool that matters most, hits version 1.0 today. It lets you store all your social activity from networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in a database you control and search, sort and analyze it. If you have a Web server that can run a PHP application, you can take control of your social network data. Ever wanted to search for a tweet more than a couple days old? Don't bother with Twitter search. ThinkUp is the only way.

ThinkUp lets you archive all your social network activity. It's free and open-source, so it's a totally extensible platform with a growing community of developers. You can search, browse, publish, analyze and visualize your content and data in all kinds of ways. Under the terms of service of your social networks, they can delete everything you've created without warning. ThinkUp lets you own your content. This isn't a review; this is a public service announcement. Go get it.

Storify, our beloved storytelling tool for the social Web, has just launched a redesign of its homepage that features top stories, topics and users. It also displays a banner across the top, filled with clickable links to the people of Storify, bearing a clear message: "All the stories happening on social media..."

Those aren't the words of a mere curation tool. That sounds like a news site. The homepage of Storify is now a destination that displays the big stories of the day according to citizens of the Web. That's homepage material for anyone who spends time on social networks, which means it's a natural place to put some ads and turn Storify into a media business.

MyLife.com, a "people search" engine that searches across social networks, has just launched a new feature called "Personal Relationship Management" (PRM), and it's much cooler than it sounds. It's a browser-based service that lets you view your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds all in one stream and reply, like, retweet and so on as needed.

This PRM stream appears on the 'Home' screen, from which you can launch all kinds of searches for old classmates, colleagues, singles and such, using MyLife's existing people searches, already in use by over 60 million people. It's a 'freemium' site, and the paid features give you more access to features like 'Who's Searching For You,' showing you people with whom you aren't already connected.

Experian Hitwise has released some new numbers about social network use around the world. It found that Brazil and Singapore are the top two countries for overall social networking use. But Facebook is not the network on which Brazilians are spending their time.

The study also measured the length of the average user's Facebook session and found that Brazilians spent comparatively little time on Facebook. While Singapore users spend nearly nearly 39 minutes per Facebook session on average, Brazilian users spend less than half that, just over 18 minutes.

Overwhelmed by new features? Tickers? Open Graphs? What about Hangouts and Circles? Well, Twitter doesn't have those things. Twitter still exists because it's not going bananas with new features all the time. There's no room. Hell, it only got photo albums a month ago. Everyone's always worried about how Twitter has only 140 characters. Well, Facebook allows 5,000 now. Isn't that a little worrisome, too? Facebook keeps track of your whole life now. Tweets fall off a cliff after a couple days. Doesn't that sound nice at this point?

Today is Friday, and on Twitter that means it's #FollowFriday. It's a hashtag holiday that's all about sharing people. There are no algorithms, no "People You May Know" (well, those are in the sidebar, but ignore them). It's just a real social gathering on the Web at the end of every week. #FollowFriday is a much maligned phenomenon, but it's just misunderstood. Read on to find out how #FollowFriday really works.

Last week, Diaspora, the open-source, privacy-aware social network of our nerdy dreams, posted its first public response to the launch of Google Plus and the recent efforts around privacy and selective sharing at Facebook. For a reaction to news that two Web behemoths are drinking Diaspora's milkshake in terms of features, the blog post sounds pretty upbeat, with perhaps just a hint of caginess. "We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles," the Diaspora team writes. "We're making a difference already."

Let's not get into whether Diaspora can take credit for features of Google Plus and Facebook. There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it's decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered.

Burning Man is, in some ways, a virtual world. It's not unlike Second Life: a flat, empty plane onto which creator/participants build a temporary society however they can, making every decision into a work of art. Indeed, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is a longtime Burner himself, and the Burning Man organization now holds an official event there. But there are also stark differences. Burning Man's principles emphasize participation, immediacy and face-to-face encounters. Plus, it's an awfully dusty place to bring your iPad.