Narrowing down the ten biggest Web news stories of 2011 was no easy task. Lots of stories had a massive impact. Some of them fit into a larger, ongoing trend, while many are singular, important events. Some stories broke to extensive attention and fanfare, only to see their significance fizzle out within a few weeks. We've painstakingly whittled down ten of the biggest stories of the year and rounded them up for you here.

The biggest story in tech this year was also one of the biggest news stories around the globe, period. The death of Steve Jobs sparked a worldwide outpouring of grief not just because he was the cofounder and CEO of one of the world's most beloved and successful companies, but also because his life was cut short at a time when he was nowhere near finished making his impact.

Walter Isaacson's official biography describes a frail and dying Jobs being actively involved in the development of the iPhone 4S and talking about about his next big idea: an Apple-branded television set, something that is expected to launch sometime next year.

Here on ReadWriteWeb we looked at Jobs's legacy in a historical context, examined his impact on user experience and design and looked at his unique approach to business and why it was so effective. Our own Scott M. Fulton III turned back the clock to the early days of Apple and took a detailed look at what Jobs meant back then. No look back at the life of a powerful and famous person would be fair or complete without an honest look at some of the less noble aspects of their legacy and even some of the business mistakes they made along the way.

In a way, Jobs was with us for the remainder of the year. Just over a year after Jobs was criticized for refusing to support Flash on the iPad other iOS devices, Adobe announced that they were abandoning the development of mobile Flash all together.

A week after his death, it was announced that the iPhone 4S had broken Apple's records by selling over 1 million units in its first 24 hours on the market. It won't be the last product we'll see that Jobs had a direct hand in developing, either. The iPhone 5, iPad 3 and rumored Apple television set are all expected to launch next year, undoubtedly with a little piece of Jobs' legacy built right in.

2. Web-Fueled Global Unrest

The year 2011 started with the fall of a dictator, and ended with several more deposed and more than one global protest movement in full bloom. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots, the headlines in 2011 were packed with social media-fueled unrest.

Following January's revolution in Tunisia, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown after a massive rebellion that was originally organized on Facebook and that fueled in large part by the Web and social networking sites. The sentiment spread to Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain with smaller movements springing up in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and elsewhere. As 2011 comes to a close, the Arab Spring is still well underway and shows no sign of letting up, even in the face of violent and repressive reactions from governments across the Middle East and North Africa.

Borrowing a page from the book of Middle Eastern protestors, activists at the Canadian magazine Adbusters put out a call for Americans to launch their own protests against the excesses of Wall Street, income inequality and the forces that caused the U.S. financial meltdown and subsequent recession. Across the country, copycat "Occupy" protests sprung up in solidarity, with many of them turning violent.

The Occupy protests, which are sometimes criticized for lacking clear goals and strategies, have relied heavily on social media both as an organizational tool and for getting the attention of the news media. After being uprooted by police in many major cities, the Occupy movement is gearing up to enter its second phase. We suspect we'll continue to hear about it well into 2012, in newspapers, magazines, blogs and tweets.

3. Launch of the iPhone 5 / iPhone 4S

For most of 2011, Apple fans eagerly awaited something everybody was referring to as the iPhone 5. Everyone, that is, except for Apple, who on October 4 launched the iPhone 4S. The device was not the "completely redesigned" handset most were anticipating, and many expressed their disappointment online, but that didn't stop the new gadget from breaking Apple's own first-day sales records.

Year-long curiosity about Apple's next smartphone made "iPhone 5" fastest-rising searches on Google in 2011. When it finally launched, the device turned out a be a more modest iteration in the iPhone product line. Most of its specs are not especially noteworthy for a new phone. It has a faster processor and better-quality camera, both standard additions to a next generation device such as this.

The real value of the iPhone 4S was in part just an extension of the overall impact the iPhone has had on the smartphone market. This year we got a better one and Apple proved that it can still make people stand in line for these gadgets, even if its not the dramatic overhaul everybody wanted.

Around the same time as the iPhone launch, we got iOS 5, one of the biggest upgrades to Apple's mobile operating system yet. The new version of iOS features a redesigned notification system, cloud-based wireless syncing of content and apps, a digital newsstand and much else.

In terms of features, the biggest thing the 4S brought to the table was Siri. The military-grade voice-activated search and "personal assistant" feature has wowed consumers, inspired parodies and given developers a new technology to hack. Siri's broader impact on search and how far hackers will be able to push its boundaries are both yet to be seen.

What's clear now is that voice controlled mobile computing got its mass market debut this year and we've only seen the beginning of what it can do.

4. Amazon Launches The Kindle Fire and Silk

Rumors that Amazon would be launching its own tablet device swirled for a good portion of the year. Leaked details from suppliers and analyst predictions all pointed to the launch of some kind of iPad competitor. The story was all but confirmed when Techcrunch got a hands-on sneak preview of the device.

In September, Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, a 7-inch, $200 Android-based tablet geared toward reading, watching video and gaming. The gadget was far from being an iPad killer, as it was small, lacked a camera, had no accelerometer and fell short on other hardware specs. But that was beside the point. Amazon made a rather decent media tablet available at less than half the cost of the iPad.

The product's first iteration may have its shortcomings, but it's good enough to open up the tablet market to a whole new category of consumers. If its early success continues into early 2012, Apple may be forced to rethink that longstanding $500 price tag when they release the iPad 3 next year.

One feature of the Kindle Fire turned into a story all its own. Silk, its proprietary Web browser, uses Amazon's cloud infrastructure to lift some of the burden of loading pages off of the device itself and can even predict browsing habits. Early tests indicate that "cloud acceleration" may actually be slower than normal browsing, and some privacy concerns have been raised about the way Silk works. Amazon has assuaged many of those concerns already and we imagine performance will improve once the product gets past version 1.0.

5. Stop Online Piracy Act + Protect IP Act

By the end of 2011, the United States Congress had two very controversial pieces of legislation about the Internet making their way through the sausage-making process. The Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House) and the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) are both geared toward doing what their names suggest. However, the scope of power the laws would give to media conglomerates and law enforcement to shut off access to foreign websites is what has many in the Internet industry up in arms.

In short, SOPA and PIPA would allow copyright holders to ask ISPs to block access to any foreign-based website that is deemed to be illegally hosting copyrighted material. It would also force the hand of search engines, ad networks and payment processors to cut off ties with any such site.

The debate over the proposed legislation has pitted the music and big media industries against some of the biggest names in Web technology. The RIAA has lashed out at Google for opposing SOPA, while the lone tech company on the list of supporters, GoDaddy, saw a major backlash among tech influencers and consumers. This reaction ultimately led to their abandoning outright support for the bill altogether.

The saga is far from over. The next hearing on the matter has been postponed until after the new year, so expect the SOPA controversy to heat right back up in a few weeks, if it even manages to die down in the meantime.

Next Page:Google Goes Social, a Failed Merger and the Year's Biggest Privacy Scandal

6. Google+

After years of getting social networking wrong and being mocked for it, Google finally launched a product that would change the tune of tech pundits and users alike. Google+ went live in June, three months after our own Marshall Kirkpatrick broke the story that Google was getting ready to launch something called "Google Circles." The circles part, it turned out, was just one feature of the search giant's new social product. The service's model of separating social connections into specific and separate groups would be one of its key selling points and may have influenced Facebook to refine its own ability to later in the year.

Other notable features include multiple-participant video chats called Hangouts and Picasa-based photo sharing. The significant of Google+ goes well beyond what you see when you load the social network in your browser. Google has baked G+ integration into many of its major products and spread its tentacles far and wide across the Web using the "+1" button.

Google+ may still be a mystery to many mainstream users, who, if they're even aware of what Google+ is, seem perfectly happy to remain part of Facebook's 800 million users. But for a product that launched only half a year ago, the social network has seen very impressive growth. It's worth remembering that right now is essentially 2004 for Google+ in terms of where it stands in its product timeline compared to Facebook. If Google's success in the browser market it is any indication, it may be a formidable competitor in the social space before we know it.

7. AT&T Tries to Gobble Up T-Mobile, Fails

It's rare that tech news stories make their way to the network evening news. The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile was one of those stories. In March, the telecom giant announced plans to pay $39 billion for T-Mobile, a move it said would help them improve network quality and deploy its 4G/LTE network across 95% of the country.

The U.S. Department of Justice saw things differently. Citing antitrust concerns, the government sued to block the deal in August, following in the footsteps of a group of consumers who had filed a lawsuit of their own. After much back and forth, with the prospects of the the deal's success having faded, AT&T dropped its bid to acquire T-Mobile in December.

Depending on who you asked, the merger could have improved cellular network quality in the U.S. and created new jobs or gouged consumers by creating an even more consolidated, oligopolistic telecom industry. Which view was more accurate is something we'll never know for sure.

8. Carrier IQ

We may well into 2012 by the time we know for sure what's going on with Carrier IQ. When the story broke a few weeks ago, it was the start of one of the biggest privacy-related scandals we've seen in quite some time.

Carrier IQ is intended to be used a diagnostic tool to help carriers and device manufactures optimize their networks and hardware. Yet the curious digging of developer and researcher Trevor Eckhart revealed that the application has been logging and transmitting a ton of information about what people are doing with their phones, including personal data like phone numbers dialed, URLs visited and the content of text messages.

The software is allegedly installed on a huge number of smartphones and could represent a massive privacy breach and possibly even illegal wiretapping. To some extent, the largescale capture of data about our activity is a necessary part of our digital lives. The question here is how much information Carrier IQ has been collecting and whether it is personally identifiable. Congress has demanded answers and the story is still very much evolving.

9. The IPOs: Groupon and LinkedIn Go Public

Two important Web companies filed to go public in 2011, albeit to somewhat different reactions. In January, LinkedIn became the first major social networking company to file an initial public offering. By May, the company's stock had soared to $122 per share, after starting out at $45. LinkedIn's stock price has seen its ups and downs since.

As a business, the social networking site for professionals has a few streams of revenue coming in. In addition to advertising, LinkedIn has premium memberships and paid job listings that help generate cash.

Facing a bit more controversy, daily deals frontrunner Groupon filed the biggest IPO of any U.S. Internet company since Google went public in 2004. After turning down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google late last year, Groupon turned heads with its massive IPO. Many have questioned the integrity of the Web group-buying service's business model and whether it can maintain growth moving forward.

Internet radio and music recommendation startup Pandora also filed an IPO this year, at $100 million. The company started trading publicly in June with a valuation of $2.6 billion.

10. HP Kills the Touchpad, Abandons Mobile Hardware Business

While other tech giants were making a big splash with their tablets - Google launching Ice Cream Sandwich, Amazon's Kindle Fire, Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad 2 - an industry veteran was moving in the opposite direction.

After lackluster early sales results, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be discontinuing the HP Touchpad tablet and all other webOS-based mobile devices. In short, it was getting out of the mobile hardware business all together.

The fate of webOS, HP's well-designed but under-appreciated mobile operating system remained unclear at first. The company said it would explore what to do with webOS, eventually settling on open sourcing it.

Steve Jobs illustration by Tim Gough

There's plenty to learn from the biography. Here are three of the main lessons that I took from the book. Each comes from an aspect of Steve Jobs' own personality, which he managed to instill into his company Apple. (Note: don't worry, there aren't any spoilers in this post!)

The Magician Genius

One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was so different and successful was his Buddhist and Zen sensibilities. Jobs traveled to India when he was a young man and the book explains how this led to his key business philosophies. I was particularly taken by the importance of intuition for Steve Jobs.

Jobs is quoted as saying, "I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis." He also said that "intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work."

You can see that intuitive sense in Jobs' incredible ability to foresee - and then design - what users will want next. The iPhone is a great example. The following passage from the book, from 2005 when Apple was looking for the next big thing after the iPod, illustrates how Jobs kept one step ahead of the market. In this case, by thinking about what could eventually usurp the market leading iPod.

"The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone." As he explained to the [Apple] board, the digital camera market was being decimated now that phones were equipped with cameras. The same could happen to the iPod, if phone manufacturers started to build music players into them. "Everyone carries a phone, so that could render the iPod unnecessary."

Later in the book, Isaacson describes how Jobs' Zen training helped him develop his love of simplicity in design:

He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

I also loved this description of Jobs:

He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power.

A Metamorphosing Butterfly

Another key learning from this book is how Steve Jobs reinvented both himself and his company many times. According to Mike Markkula, who became a one-third owner of Apple in 1977 and went on to be CEO (1981-83) and Chairman (1985-1997), the legacy of HP was a big influence:

They [Jobs and Markkula, in 1997] spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs's ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. "Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business," Markkula said. "You've got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis." Jobs didn't say much, but he agreed.

That nugget of wisdom eventually led to the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and everything else that Apple achieved in the '00s.

As an aside, one of the things I learned from the book was that the iPad idea actually came before the iPhone one. The multi-touch interface was perhaps the biggest innovation in the iPhone and it came from a team developing a prototype tablet. Jobs decided to use it in the iPhone and put Apple's focus on that product first:

That project [what was to become the iPhone] was far more important [in 2005], so he put the tablet development on hold while the multi-touch interface was adopted for a phone-size screen.

This Steve Jobs quote, in which he references his beloved Bob Dylan, is a nice summary of his reinvention capability:

"That's what I've always tried to do--keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying."

Focus

Steve Jobs' personal intuition helped the company to reinvent itself across many different product lines. Isaacson named seven industries that Jobs revolutionized or reimagined over his career: personal computers, animated movies, music, telephones, tablet computing, digital publishing and retail stores.

Apple achieved all of that because of the focus and decisive leadership provided by Jobs:

One of Jobs's great strengths was knowing how to focus. "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do," he said. "That's true for companies, and it's true for products."

Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 in a failed leadership battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley. In 1997, he returned to Apple and one of my favorite Jobs stories comes from that time. On his return, he reduced Apple's bloated computer product range from about 40 to just 4. This passage, set in an internal meeting, describes how he did it:

He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.

Another part of Jobs' leadership was creating a remarkable organization chart around him, whereby all of the key decision makers were just one or two steps from Jobs. He also implemented a culture of accountability over the whole company.

Towards the end of his life Jobs even counseled the CEO of Apple's primary competitor, Larry Page of Google, about focused leadership:

"The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up."

What Did You Learn From Steve Jobs' Bio?

Those are just three of the things that I learned from this biography of Steve Jobs. Although it's a sympathetic portrayal of Steve Jobs' life and career, the author Walter Isaacson does point out some of the downsides of these characteristics. Jobs' drive for focus, for example, often led to callous treatment of his employees.

But we have to accept that Steve Jobs was a unique individual and it's impossible for anyone else to even come close to being the person he was. The best we can do is learn from what Steve Jobs taught us about product innovation and leading a technology company. If you're at all interested in those topics, I strongly encourage you to read this biography. If you have already, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments.

To put things in perspective, when the iPhone 4 launched last year, it set a record for Apple by racking up 600,000 pre-orders in a single day. Even though it's not the dramatically overhauled iPhone 5 many were hoping for, Apple's latest gadget has smashed the company's previous single day sales record by more than 66 percent. In terms of first day pre-orders, the iPhone 4S is the most successful product Apple has ever released.

How iPhone 4S Enables Content Creation (and Consumption)

The iPhone 4S offers a few crucial upgrades to the users' ability to both consume and create content. Siri, the iPhone's new voice-activated "personal assistant" feature could represent a new way for people to interact with machines big and small, assuming it works as well as consumers expect it to. It's not the first time this type of sophisticated voice search has been available on smartphones; Siri was already an app before Apple bought it, Dragon Go! uses similar technology and Google offers Voice Actions for Android.

By baking it so thoroughly into the operating system of a hot consumer mobile handset, Apple could do what it does best and propel the technology toward mainstream adoption. While controlling one's phone by voice isn't necessarily in all circumstances, it can be pretty useful while driving. If things go well, we could perhaps expect it to see the technology built into larger interfaces like laptops running Mac OS X and Apple's rumored HDTV set ("Show me the latest episode of 'Two and a Half Men', Siri!")

With each iPhone release, Apple is getting more serious about content creation as well. In the iPhone 4S, the company set their sights on improving the camera significantly. The iPhone 4 is already the most widely-used camera on Flickr and it remains the only platform on which Instagram exists.

The 8 megapixel camera in the newest iPhone not only improves on the picture quality and enables better low-light photography, but it's much faster and iOS 5 will turn the phone's volume button into a shutter release, making it easier to snap a picture without jumping through hoops.

Steve Jobs' Last Hurrah

One of the many hopeful rumors floating around the Web prior to last week's launch was the possibility that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs would make an appearance at the event in Cupertino. Sadly, we now know that even if such a move would have been a good idea from a marketing standpoint (this was widely debated), an appearance by Jobs was never to be. He passed away the next day, seven years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Whether or not the outpouring of grief over Jobs' death contributed to the boost in iPhone sales, we'll never know, nor does it much matter. The iPhone 4S probably wasn't the last Apple product that Jobs had a hand in creating, but its success is a testament to much of what the eulogies have pointed out in the last several days.

Steve Jobs illustration by Tim Gough.

When Jobs introduced the App Store in June 2008, porn was at the top of the not-allowed-here list of content. Some apps containing nudity snuck into the App Store, and were later pulled. Now only partial nudity seems to show up (e.g. Beautiful Boobs, Asian Boobs), especially if it only focuses on boobs.

Speaking of boobs, in June 2010 Apple once again censored "Ulysses Seen," a web comic version of the classic James Joyce novel. Apple forced the creators to remove images that contained nudity before they would approve it as an iPad app. History seems to have repeated itself here: Ulysses had been put on trial in 1933. Apple ended up changing its mind after all, so the boob-filled web comic is available for download.

A few months after the App Store opened in June 2008, a great controversy erupted over an app called Podcaster that Apple decided to reject. It would have permitted people to listen to podcasts without downloading them first to iTunes; Apple worried that the app "duplicated the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," and thus saw it as a threat. Here is a longer list of types of apps that Apple rejected from its Mac App Store.

In September 2010, Apple's iTunes social network Ping omitted Lady Gaga's Tweets in which she protests anti-gay marriage legislation Prop8. But don't worry, Apple still released an It Gets Better video, so they must be pro-gay folks, right?

Not long after that, in October 2010, Apple was awarded a patent that could stop people from sending "objectionable" text messages. It was filed in January 2008, and approved on October 12, 2010, and would allow certain content to be filtered based on parental controls. While it might seem like Apple is trying to keep its devices safe from porn, and therefore more workplace and school-friendly, this was still one step closer toward authoritarian control over the iPhone.

Additional apps were banned from the App store: In July 2011, Apple removed the ThirdIntifada app from its store because it "glorified violence against Israel." Apple also banned the violent comic book "Murderdrome" from its App Store, based on the Apple SDK which states that "Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users." There were a few beheadings and ripped out limbs - but those aren't unusual in the world of comic books.

Here's perhaps the most telling App store ban of all: On September 13, 2011, an app called Phone Story, a game that also serves as social commentary, was banned from the Apple App Store only a few hours after its release. The answer as to why this happened was actually quite simple, and can be found in this elegantly written description of the game:

"Phone Story is a game for smartphone devices that attempts to provoke a critical reflection on its own technological platform. Under the shiny surface of our electronic gadgets, behind its polished interface, hides the product of a troubling supply chain that stretches across the globe. Phone Story represents this process with four educational games that make the player symbolically complicit in coltan extraction in Congo, outsourced labor in China, e-waste in Pakistan and gadget consumerism in the West."

Oh wait, that sounds a whole lot like exactly what Apple does! Yet Apple would never come out and say that. Instead, they said that the app was banned because it "depicted violence or abuse of children," and "presented excessively objectionable or crude content." This highly questionable act raises serious concerns over the freedom of information in a democratic society, playing into Apple's "walled garden" approach to both its products, and the Web at large.

The Controversies

In 2008, the Advertising Standards Authority responded to two British TV viewers who claimed that a TV ad featuring a voiceover that said "all parts of the Internet are on the iPhone" was misleading because the iPhone didn't support Flash or Java. The ad was found to breach CAP (Broadcast) TV Advertising Standards Code rules 5.1 (Misleading advertising), 5.2.1 (Evidence) and 5.2.2 (Implications), and could not be broadcast again.

Also back in 2008, a gaping security hole in Apple's firmware posed serious problems for anyone who wanted to lock their phone. Instead of being able to lock the phone with a security code, anyone could bypass that by tapping the 'Emergency Call' button and then double tapping the homepage (if it was set to the default favorites).

Apple's Inhumane Working Conditions

Apple outsources its labor to China's most horrible factories, and abuses at one in particular stand out: The Foxconn Factor in Shenzhen, China. Here, some workers as young as 12 years old were forced to work for extended periods of time to meet increased demand for iPhones and iPads from all over the world. As popularity increased for Apple devices, workers were pushed to work longer. Workers ages 18-20 were being forced to work 60-80 hours of extended overtime every month in cramped, low-quality conditions. They were being treated like the very machines they were being forced to produce.

Inhumane treatment of workers first came to light when seven workers at the Foxconn plant committed suicide in May 2010. They were working on the iPad production sector. After these suicides, workers were required to sign a statement that says they are not allowed to commit suicide.

Image via Flickr user mailox.

Will you continue to buy Apple products? Tell us why or why not in the comments below.

On the main WordPress blog founder Matt Mullenweg writes:

We work harder and have higher standards because of the bar set by Apple's experiences, and I don't know what WordPress would look like today if not for the inspiration he gave all of us.

The theme was created by Stuart Brown, and WordPress.com users can install it from Appearance → Themes or directly from the Theme Showcase. Here's how Mullenweg describes it:

This theme is a whimsical homage to the days in black and white, celebrating the magic of Mac OS. It displays your menu items, year archives, and categories as folders and icons on the evoked desktop.

For all the memories it brings -- and its throwback design -- this theme has modern functionality under the hood. Create your own custom menu to replace the first set of icons in the sidebar, upload a custom header image to display below the blog title, or set a custom background. Also included are two footer widget areas and a full-width page template that drops the sidebar.

This is such a cool design, and it's a great tribute to the man who redefined user experience for all of us. If you're a WordPress user, try out the theme on your blog and see if it inspires you to make something great.

Everyone from Apple customers and admirers to other tech luminaries and the President of the United States expressed their condolences in the form of obituaries, blog posts, tweets and status updates on Facebook and Google Plus. Somber homepage tributes went live on Apple.com, Google.com and other major websites, and some publications like Wired and Boing Boing altered their homepages dramatically to pay tribute to Jobs.

Among the most widely-circulated (and worth reading) tributes came from Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, who was friends with Jobs, and Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, who recounted the exuberant experience of meeting Jobs, as well as the more tense exchanges the two later had when Gizmodo acquired a stolen prototype of the iPhone 4 before its release.

This Week in Tech host Leo Laporte streamed a special, impromptu segment in which he and other technology journalists and commentators shared stories and thoughts related to Steve Jobs, sometimes on the verge of tears.

While the epicenter of the mourning was undoubtedly the Silicon Valley and the news dominated major media outlets across the United States, the passing of Steve Jobs was in fact a global news story.

"Steve Jobs is dead and I learned about it first through a notification on my android from a #Libya colleague on Facebook," tweeted Small World News founder Brian Conley. Another tweet, this one from NPR social media guru Andy Carvin read, "Right now I'm seeing tweets from Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, all united by one thing: #RIPstevejobs."

While most of the reflections on Jobs' life and career were highly positive, sometimes bordering on deifying, the reaction was not without criticism of some of his business practices. Some tactfully pointed out common critiques of Apple, including factory working conditions, their environmental impact and the limited nature of Jobs' philanthropic efforts.

It was was with somewhat less tact, however, that controversial Westboro Baptist Church tweeted about plans to picket Jobs' funeral because he "gave God no glory & taught sin." That tweet, as many were quick to point out, was sent from an iPhone.

More on Steve Jobs From ReadWriteWeb:

• Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
• A Great User Experience: The Web Legacy of Steve Jobs
• What Steve Meant Back Then
• The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works

In this post I want to highlight 3 main things that I'm grateful to Steve Jobs for: 1) re-defining mobile computing with the iPhone and iPad; 2) his design philosophy; 3) his leadership. Steve Jobs strived for greatness in the products his company built, which resulted in a great user experience on the Web for millions of people.

Over the years, Steve Jobs had been at the helm of a number of revolutionary technology products, including the MacIntosh computer in 1984 and the iPod in 2001. In January 2007, Steve Jobs announced what was arguably his biggest triumph: the iPhone.

At the time, Jobs described the strange new product as "three revolutionary new products" all rolled up into one device. Part iPod, part phone and part "internet mobile communicator". He boldly claimed that this new hybrid product, called an iPhone, would reinvent the phone. It would be "the Internet in your pocket for the first time ever."

As Steve Jobs was fond of saying at the time: boom! Because the iPhone more than lived up to Jobs' descriptions. It brought the Mobile Web alive with its touchscreen display, native apps and Web browser.

Although the native apps would later come to define the Mobile Web on iPhone, in January 2007 it was the Web browser - Apple's Safari browser optimized for iPhone - that was probably the most impressive thing about the new device. Jobs called it "the first fully-usable browser on a cellphone." For those of us who came of age with the WAP version of Mobile Internet - a puny, minimal version of the Web for previous generations of smartphones - this was indeed a revelation. So this is what the Web should be like on a mobile phone!

When I wrote up the iPhone launch in January 2007 (nearly 5 years ago now, can you believe it!), I wrote:

Apple is really upping the ante in the Mobile Web market. I think this will finally propel mobile Internet into the mainstream. Maybe 2007 will be the year of the Mobile Web after all!

Just a couple of weeks prior to the iPhone launch, the Mobile Web was merely third in a RWW poll asking what would be the defining trend of 2007. That's how skeptical most people were, in that pre-iPhone time, about the long-promised dream of the Mobile Web. But after Steve Jobs showed the world his company's new fangled device, that all changed.

If the iPhone was a revolution for the Mobile Web, then the iPad was Act II. The iPad was announced by Jobs in January 2010 and once again re-defined how people read and write on the Web.

Design Ethos: Make Great Products

Steve Jobs was always the first to say that the revolutionary Apple products he announced were team efforts. But a lot of the success of those products came down to the design ethos that Steve Jobs had and infused into his company. He was a perfectionist and strived to make great products.

While Jobs' design ethos was primarily focused on hardware decisions - for MacIntosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad and other big Apple products - it also had a huge impact on the Web. It raised peoples expectations for what the user experience on the Web should be. Sometimes, Jobs made contentious decisions - for example deciding to exclude Flash technology from all iOS devices, which essentially meant that many Web videos could not be viewed on the iPhone or iPad. But he always had a design reason for those decisions (in the case of Flash, because it slowed down the device and thus made for a frustrating user experience).

The following video gives a glimpse of the quest for "greatness" that Steve Jobs pursued at Apple:

Leadership: Jobs at The Center

Steve Jobs was one of the great leaders of the modern technology era, rivaled only by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The two had more in common than is generally recognized. Both were visionary, driven to succeed and very focused. Also, both companies revolved around the controlling leadership of their iconic founders.

A book about Steve Jobs that I reviewed in May 2008 - Inside Steve's Brain, by Leander Kahney - asserted that much of Apple's success can be attributed to the personality traits of Jobs. Here's just one example of how the decisions that Steve Jobs made led to the eventual success of the company (it became the most valuable company in the world in August): when Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO in the 90's, one of the first things he did was cut down the number of products Apple had, from around 40 to just 4. Jobs simplified Apple's brand and focused it on the key products that consumers wanted.

An organization chart that Forbes Magazine created earlier this year perfectly encapsulates Jobs' leadership style. All major decision makers within Apple were only one or two people removed from the man himself. Jobs also created a culture of accountability - his staff had to take direct responsibility for things. As Fortune described it:

At Apple there is never any confusion as to who is responsible for what. Internal Applespeak even has a name for it, the "DRI," or directly responsible individual. Often the DRI's name will appear on an agenda for a meeting, so everybody knows who is responsible.

The design ethos and leadership style of Steve Jobs led to two revolutionary Mobile Web products, amongst the many other Apple products that have changed peoples lives over the past 30+ years.

Steve Jobs, you will be sadly missed. I'm grateful for all that you gave us - and for helping to make the Web truly great. R.I.P., sir.

The technology world was saddened to learn today that Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., has passed away. He was 56 years old.

Apple's board of directors released this statement:

We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.

To remember him, watch his famous 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University entitled "How To Live Before You Die:"

Here are some of our favorite posts celebrating this world-changing icon:

• Boom! iPhone Rocks Tech World
• The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works
• As Steve Jobs Steps Down, Linux Turns 20: Which Changed the World More?
• What is Apple Without Steve Jobs?

From inspiring Windows to pioneering creative uses of personal computers to popularizing quality industrial design and mobile media consumption, to finally delivering on the sci-fi promise of tablet computing, Jobs has been at the forefront of global cultural evolution for decades.

Apple's acquisition of NeXT brought Jobs back into the fold, and the era that followed brought us the iMac, the iPod, and all the successive innovations in personal computing and digital media that followed. This year, Apple has launched a major release of Mac OS X, and the iOS 5 update for its mobile devices is set to launch this fall. Jobs' vision for Apple's range of products has made the company one of the most valuable in the world.

The Right Man For the Job
COO Tim Cook, who will succeed Jobs as CEO, has made much of this success possible by ensuring efficient supply chains and exclusive access to parts and materials for the manufacture of Apple's hardware. Thanks to Cook's operational vision, Apple's new family of devices has made it difficult for other companies to compete on both quality and price.

The iPad dominates the tablet market, which has so upended PC sales that HP left the PC business entirely, citing the punishing reality of the "tablet effect." Cook has been instrumental in shaping Apple's current strategy, and he already acted as CEO while Jobs was on medical leave.

Apple's board of directors issued this press release today:

CUPERTINO, Calif., Aug 24, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Apple's Board of Directors today announced that Steve Jobs has resigned as Chief Executive Officer, and the Board has named Tim Cook, previously Apple's Chief Operating Officer, as the company's new CEO. Jobs has been elected Chairman of the Board and Cook will join the Board, effective immediately.

"Steve's extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world's most innovative and valuable technology company," said Art Levinson, Chairman of Genentech, on behalf of Apple's Board. "Steve has made countless contributions to Apple's success, and he has attracted and inspired Apple's immensely creative employees and world class executive team. In his new role as Chairman of the Board, Steve will continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration."

"The Board has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO," added Levinson. "Tim's 13 years of service to Apple have been marked by outstanding performance, and he has demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does."

Jobs submitted his resignation to the Board today and strongly recommended that the Board implement its succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO.

Business Insider has Jobs' resignation letter to Apple and its board of directors.

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Photo credit: Apple

The account has likely angered its share of Apple fan boys and company execs, but it's not the content of the messages that (necessarily) got the account in trouble. Beginning January 1 this year, an "online impersonation law" went into effect in the state of California, banning people from assuming someone else's identity online in order to defraud or harm. Several commentators have suggested that the fake Steve Jobs account may have run afoul of the law or that Twitter received a "valid report" complaining of infringement.

In a nutshell, you need to make it clear that the account isn't the real person's. Although the @ceoSteveJobs did indicate in its profile that it was a parody and most people recognized it as such, the account was cited in a Daily Mail article this summer, making it appear as though Steve Jobs was admitting that antenna problems would force an iPhone 4 recall.

Twitter's guidelines for parody accounts say that the username should not be the same as the subject of the parody. They should have a qualifier like "not" or "fake." The profile name, similarly needs to say "not" or "fake." And the bio should say "This is a parody." The phony Steve Jobs account only complied with the latter.

Even if you follow these recommendations, Twitter's guidelines say that it can still ask you to make "further changes to bring the account more in line with these best practices. Accounts with a clear intent to deceive may be permanently suspended."

Twitter wouldn't comment on this specific case, although it does appear that the account is functioning again today. It's under a new name, however - @falseSteveJobs. The timing is excellent, as I'm curious to hear what False Steve has to say about the new iPad 2.