The thing journalists still do today is extract and present the viewpoints of people who matter more to the business they cover than the journalists themselves. Here now in living color are a handful of the most revealing, poignant, and on occasion, truthful statements made to ReadWriteWeb journalists in the year about to pass.

After people finish college, they probably grow (in their professional capacity) about 10% a year - learning and earning double in 7 years. As a startup, you can't afford to do it that way. You need to invest in them and get them to grow faster. Spending time with them is key.

Auren Hoffman, CEO, Rapleaf, a personal data aggregation service, to RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick, September 8, 2011.

#9

I see the platform business being in a once-in-a-decade transformation. That transformation is driven by the move to cloud, to build social apps, mobile apps, real-time applications. Developers are saying, "Look, the ten-year-old technologies from .NET or Java Enterprise Edition weren't really designed for this new world."

#8

We're faced with a real challenge of covering an entirely new coverage area. A lot of the tried and true methods don't work anymore. I remember being a cub reporter and going in at 5 am to write up the police blotter. There are no media rooms in what we're trying to cover. No one is faxing us things. There are so much less formal systems; everything's out there but it's an enormous mess. When someone walks down the street it doesn't leave a path of 1s and 0s but when someone walks down the street on Twitter, it does.

Nick White, CEO, The Daily Dot, to RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick, August 23, 2011.

#7

I think one of the real challenges was not knowing what the challenges were going to be and kind of uncovering a lot of new problems here that no one has solved in the past. So, it requires a lot of new solutions that no one has never thought up. It is a lot of hard work.

Mat Marquis, principal designer, The Boston Globe, discussing the paper's "responsive redesign" project with RWW's Dan Rowinski, September 14, 2011.

#6

A lot of us are too willing to accept roles as consumers in society. I understand the economic reasons for that, but I don't think it leads to a fulfilling life or a sustainable community. The best way out of this is to deconstruct what you're consuming, or better yet to become a creator yourself. I'm trying to help people see their own creativity.

Douglas Roshkoff, author, Program or Be Programmed, to RWW's Klint Finley, May 26, 2011.

#5

There are literally 100 million people who are building software in one way, shape, or form. One of the things that we want to do, particularly in this world of connected devices and continuous services, is to say, how can we make our platforms and our tools desirable and relevant to the broader development community? At the same time... we absolutely want to keep in mind that there is a set of people who we call "the existing Microsoft developer base," and we actually want to figure out how to move them forward into this new world. When you have a .NET or a .NET code base, how do you bring that forward into the new world? Do you want to run it as a Windows Desktop application, or into the Metro world? We want to make it easy for people to bring their skill set, their expertise, and their code forward into this new world.

S. Somasegar, Senior VP, Microsoft Developer Division, to RWW's Scott M. Fulton, III, September 14, 2011.

#4

The concept of journalism is going away. It is not enough to be a writer. You need to be a writer and an expert.

Jason Calcanis, CEO, Weblogs, Inc., to RWW Managing Editor Abraham Hyatt, June 13, 2011.

#3

It's astonishing to me that, when we see certain people with some of the quality that Steve Jobs undoubtedly had, we reject them out of hand because they stand against the tide. Their "hell-no-ness," if you will, gets on our nerves. I dare say, especially if they're women. And that's a little sexist.

Carmi Levy, contributing analyst, CTV News Channel, to RWW's Scott M. Fulton, III, November 24, 2011.

#2

BROWSER SHOULD BE WINDOW TO INTERNET. IT NOT JOB OF WINDOW TO BREAK THING YOU LOOKING AT DEPENDING ON WHAT WINDOW YOU USE.

@FAKEGRIMLOCK, GIANT ROBOT DINOSAUR MAKE COMMENT IN COMMENTS, AT JON MITCHELL, OTHER DAY IN 2011.

#1

It became too much of a tangle. At the end of the day the focus on what was important was lost, and what is important are the developers.

These are the stories that answer that question you sometimes hear from tech skeptics or those who mistake advances in computing and communications for Beanie Babies and Segways. The question is "So what?" Here's what.

Wikleaks

Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories. It started with release by the wiki-based whistle-blowing site in April of a video that seemed to show a U.S. helicopter gunship killing a number of Reuters journalists. We picked up the story when Wikileaks released 91,000 documents pertaining to the Afghanistan War. We followed with its release of 400,000 Iraq War documents and the recent release of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

Wikileaks, the site and the group behind it, could not have happened until the social web did. Leaks have happened for decades but the penetration and the mass of documents only became possible recently. Websites, email, wikis, blogs, microblogs and social networks created a network of avenues for leaks to come in and to spread out again.

The stories that the overall Wikileaks story gave birth to included criticism of the group and its founder. Questions arose. Was transparency desirable for its own sake? Is the principal of transparency worth men's lives and countries' safety? Did it make our world more safe by requiring governments to face up or less safe by uncovering things that are not necessarily illegal or immoral but secret to maintain lives? It's a story that is destined to keep on giving.

Online Tyranny

The level of oppression against users of social media and other online tools reached a stupendous level in 2010. As a look at our weekly feature "This Week in Online Tyranny" shows, men and women were arrested, sentenced, beaten and tortured every single week. The fear and anger those who hate dissent show to anyone who didn't roll over doubled and redoubled as social media gained more and more users around the globe.

Low-lights include the sentencing of Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan to almost 20 years in prison in Iran; the release, after additional torture, of the longest-serving imprisoned blogger, Kareem Amer; and the passage by the United Nations of a resolution that provides justification for blasphemy-based imprisonment and torture.

Having covered the increasing sophistication of online oppression since January of 2005, I would be lying if I claimed to see anything positive developing. Repressive governments around the world have proven much quicker to understand and accept the power of the social web than the world's media or business leaders have. Want to know where the online world is headed? Watch the internal police services of China, Iran and Egypt. They know.

Computer Warfare on Industrial Targets

Outside of the security field, the idea of a computer virus tailored to a specific country and a specific undertaking was the stuff of paranoid thrillers. This year, the reality of country-to-country viral warfare was brought home with the unleashing of the Stuxnet virus.

As the story played out, a number of eye-widening facts came to light. The virus was made by a highest-level digital team over a prolonged period. It was aimed solely at supervisory control and data acquisition systems, used only on large industrial machinery. Further, it was aimed directly at particular frequency converter drives from specific vendors. Those vendors exist only in Finland and Iran. It was designed, in fact, to change motor speed on, among other things, uranium processing facilities in Iran.

The ubiquity of digital communication pathways mean that this is only the most dramatic event in governments targeting each other in this manner, not the last one.

When Old Communist Apparatchiks Think You've Gone Too Far, You've Gone Too Far

China is the gold standard for censorship. Pioneering what one specialist called "networked authoritarianism," the leadership of the country knows it cannot flick a switch and shut down criticism. The Internet, especially China's, is too big to scientifically restrict, so in a sense terror must be used. It employs a combination of technical filtering, legal restrictions on free speech and social restrictions.

• Technical: filters and search feeds on "problematic" terms.
• Legal: rules against criticizing the regime and various vague types of libel.
• Social: strong-arming and threats against both individuals, such as writers and activists, and groups, such as publications and Internet cafe owners.

A sort of social terror keeps the population in line enough for its Internet police to stomp down on real trouble-makers.

Well, now "real trouble-makers" include folks like Cheng Jianping. She added a sarcastic RT to a post on her Twitter account, was arrested and is now spending what should be her first year of married life in a forced labor camp. Perhaps it is the Orwellian singularity Chinese censorship is heading toward that has driven a large group of influential, retired old guard communist leaders to put their collective foot down.

What does it mean that such an august group publicly upbraids the wise guys of Chinese Internet policy? Maybe nothing. But maybe shame and a sense of betrayal will succeed where words, words, words have not.

A Privacy Intrusion of Mammoth Proportions

When India, the second largest country, and the largest democracy, on Earth starts up an allegedly elective, and practically mandatory, public ID program, the fiction of the Internet as liberator sinks right in.

India's record on privacy was not great prior to this announcement. It has demanded, for instance, that Blackberry-maker RIM decrypt its user records for the government or it will be thrown out. They extended this demand to every device-maker that uses encryption. But the project to force every one of its one billion citizens to carry a card or other device linked to a central record, or risk denial of everything from housing loans to water, is one step beyond.

Regardless of whether it is a practical undertaking given the state of the country's sorry digital infrastructure, it is a Brobdingnagian object-lesson in just how little regard a country can have for this fragile fiction of right of privacy. Maybe Zuckerberg was right and privacy is dead. But if so, as India will no doubt show us, anything we might call us dies with it.

After the jump, Google Street View, computers made of brains, the Oxford English Dictionary and more.

Google Investigated, Sued for Privacy Offenses

When it was revealed that software in Google's Street View photo cars gathered not just general information on Wi-Fi locations for Google Maps, but also private information such as photos and emails, all hell broke loose for the company.

In quick succession, the company was investigated by Germany, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, Italy, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and South Korea. Attorneys General from over two-thirds of the states in the U.S. even met to arrange concerted action against Google. Oh, and there were private suits too of course.

Google eventually agreed to start sharing information on their collection process and software. Although the U.K. found the company innocent of criminal wrong-doing, investigations led to the ability of Germans to opt out of inclusion in the mapping service.

And the global tug-of-war over privacy goes on.

Better. Stronger. Faster.

As much as technology is said to change and as operant as Moore's law may be, the basic nuts and bolts of computing haven't seemed radically different to the vast majority of users for who knows how long. If you put a iPad next to an '84 Macintosh, sure, you can see a difference, but under the hood it's basically the same.

Now, however, work is being done that is leading to, and in some cases has already led to, a whole different kettle of computational fish. First, there's graphene and water. Some mad scientists created graphene using - my hand to G-d - some Scotch tape and a pencil. Now it's the strongest, thinnest, most conducive material on earth. Its potential for exponentially speeding up computing centers on using (how am I not making this shit up?) water. Take a wafer of graphene and slap it onto one of silicon and silicon dioxide, then send water into the tiny space between the two; the water backs away from the silicon toward the graphene, de-conducting the water, and breaking the connection.

OK. Now, IBM has thrown the giant Frankenstein-switch on its Watson Research Center for a five-year quantum computing project. Using a superconducting material like rhenium or niobium and cooling it to absolute zero they create quickly burnt-out qubits for quantum computing. They use standard electronic manufacturing to create resonators that allow for the entanglement of qubits, creating much more computational force.

Finally, they are now making computers out of brains. A Columbia University group is using "cortically coupled computer vision" and an EEG cap to united those things the brain does better than a computer and those thing a computer does better than a human brain. It works.

In a generation, the inside of a computer may bear as much resemblance to those we use now as what's under a car hood does to what's beneath a horse's ribcage.

The Ongoing Dialogue Between New Tech and Legacy Tech

The outcry when we published a story titled, "Oxford English Dictionary May Never Be Published Again" was profound from a group of techies probably reading the story on their brain implants. It was a microcosm of the back-and-forth between new ways of doing old things and the old ways of doing them. "As for the advantages of a paper version, they are undeniable but ultimately replicable," said one reader, with another countering "Nothing beats a hardcopy backup."

This dialogue even happens internally here. Richard MacManus, the founder and editor, wrote one post titled "5 Ways That eBooks Are Better Than Paper Books" and had to follow it up the next day with a post titled, "5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks."

And when I canvassed all the "early adopters" I'm surrounded by here for a post called "The Truth About Legacy Technology" I discovered that almost every single one of them regularly used, and loved, both the very latest communications tech and absolute antiques - like pen and paper.

A lot of consciousness of web technologies was born to the gospel of "disruption." That note is so strong it's become our tonic. But it's not the whole picture. There is always an impassioned conversation going on between the past and the future...in the present. And the present is where we live.

Social Media and Politics in the Developing World

Between the controversies surrounding Wikileaks and the perpetual cycle of arrests under repressive regimes, it's easy to forgot what a tool the social web can be in the hands of people historically under-represented in the global discussion. Two examples this year of the latter are the Kenyan and Nigerian elections.

During this year's Kenyan legislative elections mobile technologies and social media were used to bring a degree of transparency and peace in short supply during the previous elections. Journalists, polling observers and the men and women on the streets used a combination of online sites and mobile phones to follow the vote counts, and keep the participants honest. Kenyan voter Samuel Ochanji waxed rhapsodic when he spoke to ReadWriteWeb.

"It's a revolution from our past shambles where votes were cast in the day and counted (read manipulated) in the night. The electoral system has been completely decentralized (which) minimizes chance for fraud and increases Kenyans' trust in the electoral process!"

In Nigeria, acting president Goodluck Jonathan declared his candidacy for the nation's highest office on Facebook, the first time such a thing had been done anywhere. Zuzeeko Abeng, a blogger from neighboring Cameroon thought the move was fantastic.

"Pundits would term the creation of a Facebook page a 'tactic' and an attempt to score political points, but without going into politics, permit me to reiterate that by creating a Facebook page, Goodluck Jonathan has demonstrated skills of good governance, leadership, transparency and accountability."

YouTube Grows Up

It may seem like a rough thing to say, but it may be that a technology like photo-sharing can only be said to really grow when it comes face to face with the ugly realities of life. And no reality of life is uglier than death. And no death uglier than murder.

Last month, a drug gang from the Mexican state of Guerrero placed a video on YouTube showing members of a rival gang bound, confessing to the murders of a more than a dozen tourists from the neighboring state of Michoacan, whom they had mistaken for members of yet another gang. If a bunch of inbred criminal thugs know about you, yours is no longer a developing technology. It is a grown-up technology in a grown-up world that is too often every bit as ugly as it is beautiful. And it's awfully beautiful.

The Culture of Technology

The culture of technology in 2010 has been an acting out of notion that "argument is the road to knowledge.' Privacy has struggled with transparency, transparency with liberty, liberty with life and life with death.

If the thesis and antithesis in each encounter is fairly clear, the synthesis is not. The closest we may come as the year nears a close is the knowledge that tidy resolutions happen in fiction, not in real life. And technology is a part of real life. The American poet Walt Whitman spoke of the resolute untidiness of life with some hope.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large--I contain multitudes.)

Here are my favorites, in no particular order...

Without a doubt my favorite new device of the year was the iPad. It changed how I consume content, particularly media content and long-form writing. This year I read a large novel on the Kindle for iPad app (Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen - an excellent book!), I subscribed to magazines using the Zinio app on my iPad (Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone and others) and I found new ways to sort through and read online articles (Flipboard, Instapaper, DropBox and more). I also enjoyed the range of apps released by media businesses - Wired, New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, and more.

Facebook

We at ReadWriteWeb have given Facebook a fair amount of criticism this year - for privacy failures, bad design, de-valuing third party content, and more. Despite all that, I've come to love using Facebook! This year I used Facebook for everything from updating my thoughts while out and about, to posting my check-ins via Foursquare, to uploading photos I'd just taken of my local beach.

The best part of Facebook this year, for me, was all of my family joining it. My Mum and Dad, along with my 2 brothers and 1 sister. All of them joined (or in one case resumed use of) Facebook this year. Much to my delight, because now I can follow my brother's power lifting videos, my other brother's iPod Touch finger paintings, my sister's new-found interest in photography, my mother's motherly comments and likes, my father's witty updates. These are obviously all personal things to me, but I'm sure that you all have had similar experiences with your family or friends on Facebook this year.

Instapaper

I mentioned Instapaper above and it's certainly one of my most used apps on the iPad. More importantly, Instapaper changed the way I consume blog and other media content. Due to a number of factors, over 2010 I didn't have enough time or attention to regularly read content from Google Reader (my RSS Reader of choice). I ended up evolving to a different style of tracking and reading the news of the day. I generally now visit my favorite blogs and news aggregators, open articles of interest to me and then save them to Instapaper for later reading - usually on my iPad or iPhone. I also find stories via Twitter and Facebook, which I save the same way.

Shazam

I continue to marvel at the technology behind Shazam's iPhone app. For anyone who isn't familiar with it: if you hear a song playing on the radio or in the background at a store, open up Shazam and it will identify the title and artist. I use it often to find out what song is playing on my car radio, or at a bar or office. It's the only app I use that makes me consistently mutter to myself: how do they do that?

Evernote

I still use my red Moleskine Cahier notebooks for freeform scribbling and note-taking. However, Evernote has increasingly become my home for other kinds of notes and for personal lists.

I admire Evernote's grand goal to become your "online brain" - to store everything from your lists, to notes about foods you discover, to photos of business cards. I'm nowhere near using it to that extent, but perhaps next year I'll extend my use cases for this product. It's nice that Evernote has that flexibility, in any case.

TweetDeck

I still find Twitter to be a user experience mess at times. For example, little bugs with Twitter lists that seem to occur every time I use them. TweetDeck has some of those frustrations too - in particular the syncing between devices is troublesome and imperfect. Nevertheless, I use TweetDeck each and every day to manage and write to @RWW (the company account, since August 2010) and @ricmacnz (my personal account now - follow me there if you can put up with my art and music ramblings).

Woopra

Without a doubt the most addictive business tool I use. Tracking statistics for ReadWriteWeb is a crucial part of my work and Woopra provides a real-time view of what's happening on ReadWriteWeb at any time of the day. I check it constantly. I get warm fuzzies when I see the WikiLeaks website driving lots of traffic to RWW. I smile inwardly when I see one of my own posts doing well. I frown when a post that I wrote isn't setting the online world on fire. My curiosity is piqued when I see an old post getting action all of a sudden. So many emotions to sustain me through my working day as an online publisher!

Foursquare

At the beginning of the year, everybody was wondering which of the location-based social networks would take off: Brightkite, Gowalla, Foursquare, or a new entrant? The answer in 2010 has been Foursquare, which most of the people in my social graph use. I began to use it too, although frankly there isn't a lot of practical benefit to Foursquare where I live - not enough people in my city use it for there to be real-time social benefits, nor have there been any discount coupons for me. However, I have found it to be a fun addition to my Facebook updates. I hope it becomes more useful though, because the game mechanics aren't enough to sustain me.

Chrome

In 2009 I switched from Firefox to Chrome, as my default browser. I felt bad for Mozilla, the organization that builds Firefox and whose ideals I admire. However, Chrome was simply faster and less prone to crashes. Chrome has continued to serve me well over 2010 and the addition of the Chrome App Store makes me curious about what it will offer in 2011.

The browser market is fiercely competitive currently and I did check out a new entrant, RockMelt, recently. However I stuck with Chrome, as it hasn't let me down.

Flipboard

Like many people, I'm enamored of the iPad app Flipboard and the way it's changed how web content is consumed. I must admit that I'm not a daily user though. I sometimes feel like I'm flipping through too much content I just don't want to consume. I'd like more serendipity. Perhaps I haven't populated it yet with the right Twitter lists.

Still, I hold out a lot of hope for Flipboard's magazine paradigm of consuming blog and similar content. In 2011, I plan to use Flipboard a lot more.

Honorable mentions

Products that didn't quite make my top 10, but which I use a lot and enjoy: Soup.io (my light blogging service of choice), Diamedic (an awesome iPhone app for diabetics), Lazyweb (my favorite topic tracker of the year, but this is a field which I think still needs a lot of work), DropBox (great way to sync files across devices), Mediagazer (probably my favorite news aggregator currently), Newsy (a video news app for iPad that I enjoyed throughout 2010) and Brushes (a finger painting app for iPad and iPhone).

There you have it, my favorite Web products of 2010. Let me know your own picks in the comments!

While we're used to seeing the intermittent Fail Whale, the outage this morning lasted a solid 24 minutes according to the company, affecting both the website and API.

Now, we don't mean to be making a mountain out of a molehill here, and this certainly wasn't like the four hour outage of last October, but it reminded us of our reliance on Twitter as a primary source of real-time communication, information and interaction.

Part of the problem we found this morning was that, especially when the API goes down too, our redundancy fails. We rely, in many ways, on our Twitter contacts list for our professional interactions and immediate, real-time communications. Normally, the website goes down but our trusty third-party clients keep on working. And many of the other sites we use simply pipe in our Twitter stream, joining it with other streams.

How can you ask the masses where to go and what to do when your megaphone is suddenly silenced? The extent to which Twitter has become the go-to source for real-time updates and mass responses suddenly became all too apparent.

Facebook we use more as a personal social network, Myspace was long ago abandoned and FriendFeed, what used to be the old standby when Twitter went down, remained a virtual ghost town during the outage this morning. Can Google Buzz pick up the slack when Twitter keels over? Or can we flip on over to Identi.ca to keep in touch? What sort of redundancy do you have built in to your social networks?

So, we had to wonder - where do you go when the Twitter lights go out? Or do you just hunker down and enjoy the silence for that sweet 24 minutes, like you might use a dusting of snow as an excuse to not drive to work that day?

As for the outage, there has been no word from the company on the cause, either on its blog or Twitter account and our emails received no response. We'll just have to chalk it up to an overflow of iPad gushing in the meantime.

Update: Twitter says that it doesn't know the exact cause of the issue yet, but says that it was an internal issue.

However, thriving tech communities exist around the globe, from Toronto to Tel Aviv, and the success of internationally-based web products serve as a reminder to all of us that innovation knows no borders. Check out our picks for the top 10 international web products of 2009 and let us know your favorite international apps in the comments.

Spotify, Stockholm, Sweden

By September 2009, we were calling Spotify "one of the most highly anticipated applications" that had not yet come to the U.S.

This lightweight streaming music app made headlines consistently throughout the year. They closed huge amounts of funding in August. And later that month, the company got an iPhone app through the App Store approval process - even though it competes with iTunes - thanks in part to the FCC. In fact, you, our readers, said it was one of the most exciting apps of the year in a survey we conducted this fall.

There's more good news, according to co-founder Daniel Ek: "We aren't interested in just trying to hype the company and then flipping it," he wrote in a blog post this October. "We are in this for the long haul."

And we look forward to reporting on Spotify's successes in 2010, as well.

FreshBooks, Toronto, Canada

We first wrote about Freshbooks late last fall. The Web-based invoicing software quickly became one of the most popular in its class; within a few months, Salesforce launched a FreshBooks Connector that took advantage of the startup's APIs. Though FreshBooks had seen many similar partnerships with other CRM systems, the stamp of approval from Salesforce confirmed FreshBooks as a leading product in its category.

Jolicloud, Paris, France

This lightweight Internet OS for netbooks allows simple access to web- and desktop-based applications. Although products of this kind are currently all the rage and becoming quite common, Jolicloud offers something unique: The inherently social ability to "subscribe" to other users of the OS and see what apps they're using. It's beautiful, it's one of the reasons we're excited about Linux on the netbook, and it's in private alpha. Request your invite now!

Hootsuite, Vancouver, Canada

This real-time stat-tracking, link-shortening, list-making, tweet-scheduling, multiple accounts-handling Twitter app does it all. Last month, we named HootSuite one of our top 10 apps for small-business success. The app also integrates Facebook profiles and, as of today, Facebook Pages.

OrSiSo, Singapore

With less than half a million dollars in angel funding, OrSiSo emerged in 2009 as an interesting - and occasionally confusing - AIR-based app for organizing social networks. The company's name stands for "Organize, Simplify, Socialize." The product accomplished all three goals so well that it won an award in February for introducing "status-quo-challenging new ideas" and representing Singapore positively to the international market of users, investors and media.

Next page: International Web Products 6-10

Moshi Monsters, London, UK

This simple social game of Tamagotchi-like pets was launched by parent company Mind Candy in 2007 but has seen a tenfold traffic increase this year, with unique visits approaching the half-million mark. This cute and casual MMO competes against such giants as Mafia Wars and FarmVille, yet it doesn't rely on a major social network to get users. We hear it's also being used in the classroom to teach fiction and creativity.

Wetoku, Seoul, Korea

When we tested Wetoku this summer, we were thrilled with the instant, lightweight video recording capabilities of this app. Intended as a "talking heads" app for long-distance video interviews - a welcome boon to bloggers in particular - the app found itself in steep competition with tech giants like Skype as much as hungry startups like TinyChat. It had drawbacks, such as low video quality. But the benefits, such as instantly embeddable content, seemed to outweigh the negative factors. "This is the kind of thing that would make remote, instant video journalism possible," we wrote.

Tweetmeme, Reading, UK

Tweetmeme is one of our favorite tools for filtering noise in the real-time web. It's also recently surpassed the traffic benchmark of 1M monthly unique visitors. The site surfaces the most popular links and retweets on Twitter, and this year, it found a revenue stream, launched a real-time version, and trounced its competition.

Jimdo, Hamburg, Germany

Jimdo was founded a couple years ago but only recently came up on our radar. A drop-dead simple website editor, multimedia DAM (digital assets management) system and CMS, this company saw significant growth - including reaching the 1 million users mark - in 2009.

Twingly, Linköping, Sweden

Twingly launched in 2007 with the promise that users would "never spend time on irrelevant news again." But it wasn't until this year that we became aware of this Swedish startup. At our real-time summit, their CEO led a brilliant breakout session on how to filter the firehose of available online information. Solving information overload is one of the primary concerns of real-time web enthusiasts, and Twingly is one startup dedicated to solving this problem.

Honorable Mentions:
Busuu, Madrid, Spain
Readtwit, Tel Aviv, Israel
Feedity, Australia
Webjam, London, UK
LouderVoice, Cork, Ireland
My6Sense, Herzliya Pituach, Israel
Huddle, London, UK
Wonga, London, UK
Face.com, tel Aviv, Israel
Wakoopa, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Special thanks to our friends around the world who helped us with this list: Zee Kane of The Next Web, Ayelet Noff (a.k.a. Blonde 2.0), Ewan Spence and Ezra Butler.

If you feel we left out an important international web app, please let us know about it in the comments!

ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009:

Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009. These are apps and services that helped consumers use the web in new ways this year; and brought technologies that were previously only geared towards advanced users to a mainstream audience.

Bing

Until earlier this year, Google didn't have any serious competition in the search market. Now, however, thanks to Microsoft's Bing - which launched in July - users finally have a choice when it comes to search engines. Bing's market share climbed steadily over the last few months, and Microsoft keeps adding interesting new features like visual search, hover previews, integrated Twitter search and a smart integration of some of Wolfram Alpha's most compelling features.

Bing, which bills itself as a "decision engine," tries to give its users more than just 10 links. Instead, Bing focuses on giving users answers right on the search results page. A search for a football or baseball player, for example, will bring up recent stats, while a search for flights brings up data from Microsoft's Bing Travel service.

Wolfram Alpha

No other new web service was greeted with the same amount of hype as Wolfram Alpha this year. Inevitably, Wolfram Research's "computational knowledge engine" disappointed many who were looking for a Google killer, but Alpha introduced a new paradigm for search engines: Instead of giving you a long list of links, Alpha tries to give users an answer based on information from reputable sources. If this sounds familiar, it might be because Microsoft's Bing is trying to do something very similar - even if Microsoft's approach isn't quite as radical. Because of these similarities, it also doesn't come as a surprise that Bing was the first search engine to integrate search results from Wolfram Alpha.

While it isn't useful for everybody yet, the Wolfram Alpha team has worked hard to expand Alpha's knowledge. If you are an engineer or scientist, Wolfram Alpha might just be the most useful web app for you. For the rest of us, Alpha's ability to solve anagrams, aggregate weather data and tell you the distance between two cities proves to be useful, too, though not as useful as the service's ability to solve complex math problems. We still have to wait and see what the future holds for Wolfram Alpha.

For now, the service is a great experiment and even if it fails (which we don't think it will), its influence will surely extend to other search engines like Bing and Google Search. In the spirit of trying something different, Wolfram also launched a $50 iPhone application in October. Even though Wolfram Alpha's web interface is available for free, the company insisted that its mobile application offered enough new features to justify this price.

Google Chrome

Google launched the first beta version of Google Chrome in late 2008. Even though Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn't offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, Chrome has already changed the browser market. Chrome's relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and even Microsoft now compares the performance of the next version of Internet Explorer to Chrome. Thanks to its fast JavaScript rendering engine and interesting new technologies, Chrome is changing the way developers are thinking about browsers. Even if you don't use Chrome, you will see Chrome's influence in the upcoming versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Chrome, of course, is also the basis for Google's upcoming Chrome OS, so chances are that we will see a lot more of Chrome in the next year.

Posterous

Whether you want to open up a new blog without any fuzz or just share photos and messages easily on multiple services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, light blogging service Posterous has you covered. The service launched in May 2009 and was definitely one of the most interesting new arrivals in the blogging landscape this year. What makes Posterous stand out is its ability to cross-post updates to other services (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or your own blog, for example). In addition, it's also extremely easy to set up a new blog. Just email a message, photo or video to post AT posterous.com and your new blog is ready to go. Advanced users can also port their own domain names to the service and theme their blogs.

With PicPosterous, the company now also offers an easy to use iPhone app.

Hulu

Thanks to its prominent ads during the Super Bowl, Hulu became a household name in the US this year. Even before this publicity campaign, however, Hulu had already established itself as a the #1 destination for finding episodes of TV shows online. Hulu started out as a joint venture between FOX, NBC and other TV networks. In April, ABC also joined this group. Thanks to this, Hulu now offers one of the only destinations to easily find TV shows online in the US. While Hulu is currently available for free, it's worth noting that Hulu could start charging for subscriptions as early as next year.

Next page: Consumer web apps 6-10

TweetDeck

Except for Twitter's own website, TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client. While a few of us here at RWW prefer Seesmic's Twitter application, there can be no doubt that TweetDeck has set the standard for Twitter clients this year. TweetDeck was the first client to popularize a column-based layout - a design feature that a lot of other Twitter clients now use as well.

In its current version (our review), TweetDeck introduced support for Twitter's new lists feature, as well as integration with LinkedIn and partial support for Twitter's new geolocation feature. TweetDeck was also one of the first clients to introduce local lists, a feature that many power users had been clamoring for long before Twitter introduced its own version of this functionality.

Twitter

No Top 10 list of web applications would be complete without mentioning Twitter. No other web service (except for maybe Facebook) has recently managed to capture our imagination to the degree that Twitter has. Over the course of the year, Twitter introduced numerous new features, including lists and integrated search. Twitter's users didn't greet every new feature with complete happiness, however. The new retweet feature, for example, was met with resistance and it's still not clear if it will win out over today's retweet convention that grew organically over the last few years.

Today, there are numerous users on Twitter with more than 1 million followers, and services like BNO News regularly break news reports on Twitter long before the mainstream media. While Twitter has its detractors, there can be little doubt that 2009 was the year when Twitter came of age.

Aardvark

Have you ever found yourself in a city you've never been to and wondered where to find a good place for lunch or dinner or just playing pool? You could go to Yelp or Citysearch, but the best suggestions are likely to come from your own personal network and the friends of your friends. Aardvark makes it possible to harvest this collective knowledge of your extended social network through an easy to use web app, instant messaging bot and iPhone app. Simply ask a question and Aardvark will route your query to one of your friends (or your friend's friends) who is currently online. Thanks to sophisticated machine learning algorithms that run in the background, Aardvark quickly learns who to ask about specific topics.

Unlike Yahoo Answers or similar services, Aardvark doesn't keep a repository of frequently asked questions. The service's mission is to get you current answers from experts in your own social networks. While we had our doubts about how well this would work when the service first launched, Aardvark has proven it's worth time and again. On most days, over 85% of all questions get answered.

Google Voice

Google loves to enter markets where the status quo prevails and turn things on their head. With Google Voice, the search giant is doing just that to the telecom and VoIP industry. Google Voice assigns every user a new phone number that can be forwarded to any phone. Google Voice, which features a Gmail-like user interface, allows its users to make free local and long distance call, as well as cheap international calls from their existing phones. The service also features free text messages, conference calls and automated voicemail transcriptions.

While other services like Ribbit Mobile and VoxOx offer similar features, Google Voice has the name recognition and marketing power behind it to make it an even more important product in the coming year. For now, Google Voice is still an invite-only service, though Google continually sends out additional invites.

Facebook

Over the course of 2009, Facebook continued to grow and added new features which ranged from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users news streams. While it still trailed MySpace in 2009, it became the #1 social network this year, and by September Facebook had passed the 300 million active user mark. The service's user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

While Facebook was once the domain of early adopters, today's Facebook population is highly diverse. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook today is users over 35.

Did We Miss Your Favorites?

This list showcases some of the favorite consumer web apps of the RWW team. What are your favorites? What web services do you think made the biggest impact in 2009? Let us know in the comments.

ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009:

Here are Google's and Bing's lists of top search queries of 2009:

Some of these are pretty straightforward (Twitter, Michael Jackson, Facebook), while others, like 'torpedo gratis' (which refers to a free SMS service) and 'tuenti' left us slightly puzzled at first. It is also interesting to note that a lot of these search terms in Google's list are basically just URLs (Twitter, Facebook, Hulu, dantri.com.vn).

Sanitized Lists

It's important to note that Bing's list was mostly scrubbed of obvious URL searches, so a direct comparison between Bing and Google is sadly impossible. Neither Google, Bing or Yahoo made lists of their actual top queries available this year. All we got so far are highly sanitized lists of "trending topics." While these reflect the current mood, they don't really give us a good idea of what people search for on a day-to-day basis.

Your Personal Top 10 in Google's Web History

If you have Google Web History feature turned on, you can find a list of your personal top queries of 2009 here.

Ask.com

Ask.com also just published its top questions of 2009 - though questions like "What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?" make us wonder about the validity of this list.

1. How much should I weigh?
2. How do I get out of debt fast?
3. How do I get pregnant?
4. What is Twitter?
5. What is Miley Cyrus' phone number?
6. What is the meaning of life?
7. When will the world end?
8. How long does marijuana stay in your system?
9. What are the symptoms of Swine Flu?
10. What time is it?

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

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

With the Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008, we've tried to select the apps that have burst onto the radar of the everyday user this year - or if not quite, then perhaps they will next year.

This is the third in a series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008

Note: We attempted to order this list from most obvious to least obvious.

1. Twitter

Twitter is the de facto leader of the microblogging scene, a realm usually rife with witty repartee between leading social media consultants and Web 2.0 developers. But when household names like Lance Armstrong, Richard Branson, Al Gore, Shaquille O'Neal, Britney Spears, and politicians across the US started using it, this year, it was clear that our selection as the Best Web LittleCo for 2007 had grown up - and entered the public consciousness.

Twitter was a constant fixture on ReadWriteWeb this year from its use as a source of news to its growing use as a customer service channel. But it wasn't without its hiccups. Midway through the year, Twitter - and its more and more frequent showings of the Fail Whale - was rapidly becoming persona non grata. In June 2008, Amazon's Jeff Bezos poured more cash into the service. And with the US elections, Twitter proved its mettle, becoming a critical forum for debate on the issues at hand.

2. Firefox

November 2008 marked the fourth birthday for Firefox, arguably one of the most successful open source projects and clearly the most popular Web browser that users have to actually install. In 2008, more and more of the consumer population gravitated to the browser that strives to deliver the Web the right way.

Firefox has continued to grow in popularity throughout 2008, but it was the download day for Firefox 3 that began to truly turn heads. Site crushing traffic to download a Web browser? Believe it. So much traffic, in fact, that it set a world record. That, and a number of other factors, had Firefox reaching a 20% market share in October of this year.

3. IntenseDebate

IntenseDebate - dubbed by RWW as the "the sophisticated blog comment system with the silly name" - provides a commenting add-in for blogs and Web sites that allows users to better manage their profiles and comments across multiple conversations. It also supports OpenID.

In 2008, distributed commenting was still a very young space with no clear leader. But when IntenseDebate appeared as the comment system on US President-elect Barack Obama's change.gov, it stepped into the public eye. Now, thousands of people are using the commenting system. This makes Automattic - the company that manages the development of WordPress - look pretty insightful for acquiring IntenseDebate this year.

4. Hulu

If Hulu - a joint video content sharing venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. - is any indication, traditional mainstream media companies are beginning to get this whole "online thing."

And with good reason. In 2008, Hulu shed its ugly duckling image and came into its own and was projected to earn a staggering $90 million in its first year. How? Again, the true turning point was the US elections. Consumers turned to Hulu as much for the political content, as for the satire - like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. Now, consumers are hooked and that affinity for the service is showing no sign of slowing.

5. Ning

Ning is a service designed to help anyone build a social network about anything that interests them. And in 2008, consumers flocked to the site to do exactly that - to the tune of a new social network created every 30 seconds.

As of October 2008, Ning was host to half of a million networks. And it will only continue to grow in the consumer space. Why? Much like Twitter, Ning has begun to attract celebrities who find the service a viable way of interacting with fans. Plus, with its integration of OpenSocial, Ning gains access to tech savvy consumers on a variety of social networks who already understand the dynamic.

6. Last.fm

Any app that incorporates consumer media and makes it easier to use is a winner. And that's why Last.fm, the socially driven music recommendation service, is a shoo-in for top consumer apps of 2008.

We at RWW spend a great deal of time focused on Last.fm - from the most popular songs to mashups created using its data to visualizing Last.fm friends networks - because we spend so much time on Last.fm. One thing is for sure with its redesigned site, the growing presence on mobile platforms, innovative programs, and interesting features, Last.fm is sure to continue gaining more and more fans.

7. Meebo

Meebo, always a favorite here at RWW, provides a centralized instant message platform that's accessible from any Web browser. While they've always been popular with the overly connected crowd, 2008 marks the year where Meebo has a growing opportunity to become a consumer favorite, as well.

In March 2008, we saw Meebo as having the opportunity to bring Web IM to the mainstream. Throughout the year, they continued to improve - including adding a revenue stream. And by October, Meebo had begun to roll out a partner program that will place its functionality on niche consumer sites throughout the Web. Even if consumers don't recognize Meebo yet, they will soon.

8. Mogulus

If YouTube taught people about online video and Ustream taught folks how to stream video, then Mogulus will be the service that teaches consumers how to broadcast online. And in a burgeoning HD market, where users are coming to expect crisp video and audio quality even online, Mogulus stands to become the streaming service of choice for serious videophiles.

In June 2008, we reported that Mogulus - which launched in May 2007 - was already reporting 4.5 million uniques. By September, that number had grown nearly 30% to 5.8 million. Clearly, the numbers are on the upswing.

9. Qik

Qik, the service that allows users to stream video to the Web from a mobile handset, may not be as prevalent on the consumer radar as some of these other apps. But it's safe to say it will be. While services like Mogulus have focused on the quality of the video stream, services like Qik have focused on the converse: the ability to stream content with devices that consumers are already carrying around. And that will be their key to success - the ability to deliver more content while hauling less gear.

At the beginning of the year, we wondered if Qik might be one of the breakout apps at SXSW 2008 given the number of tech types participating in its early testing. By the middle of 2008, Qik had opened its beta to more participants. And since that point, they've focused on making the service available on both mass market phones and some smart phones. No doubt, the ability to shoot video with that phone in your pocket will be as compelling to consumers as taking photos - if not moreso.

10. Cooliris

Cooliris may be the least obvious - and least recognized - of our consumer app selections, but it has that certain something that makes us sure its going to be popular with the less technically savvy. For those of you who haven't had the chance to try it, Cooliris is a browser extension that provides a 3D environment for thumbing through visual sites - like photo and video sites. What's more, it makes it fun. And that's why consumers will continue to be attracted to it.

We covered Cooliris - then called PicLens - in February 2008, finding it "a lot of fun to play with and makes searching and viewing images on the web very enjoyable." By June 2008, they had added Amazon items and YouTube videos. Even the iPhone got the Cooliris treatment with the Cooliris iPhone app. Most recently, Cooliris has unveiled features that allow users to personalize selections - and that allows Cooliris to sell more advertising. Visual browsing is still coming into its own, but Cooliris is leading the charge in a way that consumers will embrace.

Now, it's your turn. What's your opinion on these selections? Are we off? Did we miss something? Are you seeing consumer adoption elsewhere?

And thanks to a new application from Simplify Media, you can now even access all that music from your desktop while on the road.

Simplify Media does something Apple should have built into the iTunes Remote already: it allows you to stream the music in your iTunes or Winamp library right to your phone or iPod touch, no matter whether you are on your home wifi network or the cell network. The interface is very similar to that of the regular iPod application, but adds some nice touches to it, including automatically downloaded lyrics and artist bios.

In order to use Simplify Media, you have to first install a small application on the machine that hosts your music and set up an account with Simplify Media. The application is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and installing it is extremely easy. As a bonus, you can also share your music library with up to 30 of your friends and family members.

We mostly tested the application over AT&T's 3G network, where songs started within seconds. Our tests on the EDGE network were also successful, but it just takes a bit more patience as you have to wait for the buffer to fill up just a bit longer.

Simplify Media is available for free for the first 100,000 users and will cost $3.99 after that. As of now, the app is still available for free on iTunes.

2) Pandora (iTunes link)

The music discovery service Pandora has been a long-time favorite here at RWW. Pandora, if you are not already familiar with it, lets you create your own radio station, based on songs or artists you like. As you listen to more songs, you can vote them up or down, which allows Pandora to calibrate itself to your music tastes. If you like a particular song, Pandora gives you the option to directly buy it from iTunes, or to bookmark the song so you can buy it later on.

Pandora's iPhone interface is similar to that of its web interface and, like most of the music apps listed here, is somewhat reminiscent of Apple's own iPod app.

One thing we noticed was that there is a trade-off between sound quality and network speed. If you are on a wifi network, you get a high bitrate and stereo sound, but if you are on a cell network (even 3G), the bitrate is adjusted to only 64kbps and the sounds is only available mono, which can sounds a bit tinny, but is still quite acceptable while you're driving in a car.

Overall, we love the Pandora application because it has allowed us to discover more new music than any radio station ever would.

3) Last.fm (iTunes link)

Last.fm is somewhat similar to Pandora, but it has more social aspects built into the app. You can, for example, play stations from your friends on Last.fm. The Last.fm application also displays any upcoming concerts by the band that is currently playing.

One limitation of the Last.fm iPhone application is that it can't look at your favorite music on your iPod and make recommendations based on this ('scrobbling'), which has always been one of the main selling-points of Last.fm on the desktop. This is probably due to the limitations of the iPhone SDK and won't feel like much of a limitation to new Last.fm users, but if you are used to this functionality, using the iPhone app will feel limited.

Once you are logged into the app, you can listen to songs you can listen to recommended songs you have already scrobbled on your desktop, listen to your friend's recommendation, or start a new station altogether. If you like a particular song, you can immediately buy it on iTunes.

Last.fm offers a higher audio quality than Pandora, but the price of this is that we experienced longer delays and more drop-outs when streaming over the 3G or EDGE network.

4) AOL Radio (iTunes link)

The AOL Radio application lets you listen to online radio stations, though the selection is mostly limited to CBS owned stations and AOL's own special interest stations (think 'All German Folk Music 24/7'). While it might seem backwards to want to listen to radio on the iPhone given that you have so many other options, a lot of the specialty AOL stations are actually quite good. There is also a nice selection of talk radio stations available, including one called 'Psychic Radio' (their motto is 'We Know You are Listening...").

The application organizes stations by location (and it can use the built in GPS of the iPhone to find your own local stations) or music genre. If you like a particular song, you can, as will all the other apps, buy it on iTunes, or bookmark it, though you can't really do anything with those bookmarks besides buying the song later on.

One restriction of AOL Radio is that some stations are only available while you are on a wifi network and there is no way of telling which stations have this restriction and which don't/

5) Tuner Internet Radio (iTunes link)

If you want more Internet radio stations and the ability to add your own streams, Tuner Internet Radio is for you, but you will also have to pay $5.99 for the privilege. While it is overall quite similar to AOL Radio, you get a lot more options and even a built in OpenGL based visualizer. One area where Tuner Internet Radio shines is in its selection of international stations. While AOL Radio mostly features CBS stations, Tuner Internet Radio also features BBC and PBS stations, among many others.

Tuner Internet Radio can play any AAC+, MP3, PLS, and M3U stream, but note that it does not support RealPlayer or Windows Media stream, which might be quite a limitation if your favorite Internet stations use these formats.

Whether buying this is worth the $5.99 is a personal decision, but if you don't mind the price, Tuner Internet Radio is, in our view, a better application than AOL Radio.

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Continuously Refactors Code
4. Uses Design Patterns
5. Writes Tests
6. Leverages Existing Code
7. Focuses on Usability
8. Writes Maintainable Code
9. Can Code in Any Language
10. Knows Basic Computer Science

1. Loves To Code

Programming is a labor of love. Like any occupation, truly great things are achieved only with passion. It is a common misconception that writing code is mechanical and purely scientific. In truth, the best software engineers are craftsman, bringing energy, ingenuity, and creativity to every line of code. Great engineers know when a small piece of code is shaping up perfectly and when the pieces of a large system start to fit together like a puzzle. Engineers who love to code derive pleasure from building software in much the same way a composer might feel ecstatic about finishing a symphony. It is that feeling of excitement and accomplishment that makes rockstar engineers love to code.

2. Gets Things Done

There are plenty of technical people out there who talk about software instead writing it. One of the most important traits of a great software engineer is that they actually code. They actually get things done. Smart people know that the best way to solve problems is go straight at them. Instead of spending weeks designing complex, unnecessary infrastructure and libraries, a good engineer should ask: What is the simplest path to solving the problem at hand? The recent methodologies for building software, called Agile practices, focus on just that. The idea is to break complex projects into short iterations, each of which focuses on a small set of incremental features. Because each iteration takes just a few weeks to code, the features are manageable and simple. Teams that follow agile practices never create infrastructure for its own sake, instead they are focused on addressing a simple set of requirements. The secret is that when this approach is applied iteratively, a rich, complex piece of software arises naturally.

3. Continuously Refactors Code

Coding is very much like sculpting. Just like an artist is constantly perfecting his masterpiece, an engineer continuously reshapes his code to meet requirements in the best possible way. The discipline of reshaping code is known as refactoring and was formally described by Martin Fowler in his seminal book. The original idea behind refactoring was to improve code without changing what it does, moving pieces of the software around to ensure that the system is free of rot and also does what it is supposed to do based on current requirements. Continuous refactoring allows developers to solve another well-known problem - black box legacy code that no one wants to touch. For decades engineering culture dictated that you should not change the things that work. The issue, though, is that over time you become a slave to the old code, which grows unstable and incompatible. Refactoring changes that, because instead of the code owning you, you own the code. Refactoring establishes ongoing dialogue between the engineer and the code and leads to ownership, certainty, confidence, and stability in the system.

4. Uses Design Patterns

Ever since the so called Gang of Four published their famous Design Patterns book, world-class engineers have been talking about patterns. Patterns are ubiquitous in our world - both in nature and all human endeavors; software engineering is no exception. Patterns are recurrent scenarios and mechanisms that live across languages and systems. A good engineer always recognizes and leverages patterns, but is not driven by them. Instead of trying to fit the system into a set of patterns, the engineer recognizes opportunities in which to apply patterns. Applying a pattern ensures correctness since it leverages existing know-how: a method for solving a particular engineering problem that has worked before.

5. Writes Tests

Long gone are the days when engineers thought of testing as beneath them. After all, how can you be certain that your code is actually working if you never test it? An agile practice called Unit Testing has recently gained popularity because it focuses on writing tests to mirror the code. As the system grows, the body of tests grows with it, providing proof that the code actually works. Experienced engineers know and understand the value of tests, because their goal is to create a working system. Good engineers will always write a test once a bug has been exposed to make sure it does not come back again. But a good engineer also knows not to waste time writing trivial or redundant tests, instead focusing on testing the essential parts of each component.

6. Leverages Existing Code

Reinventing the wheel has always been one of the biggest problems in the software industry. From inventing new languages to rewriting libraries, the strange drive to ignore and redo what is already there and already works has been the cause of a lot of software failures. A rockstar engineer will focus on three essential kinds of reuse. First of all, the reuse of internal infrastructure, the code that he and his peers have written. Secondly, the use of third party libraries, for example, in Java, the libraries that are part of JDK or popular libraries provided by the Apache Foundation. And finally, a good engineer would look to leverage web-scale web service, like the ones offered by Amazon. Correct leveraging of existing infrastructure allows rockstar engineers to focus on what is most essential - the application itself.

7. Focuses on Usability

Good engineers always focus on the users. Whether the user is a business or an individual, whether the engineer works for a consumer software company or an investment bank, the focus is on working, usable software. How will users interact with the system? Does it provide a simple, intuitive, and smooth experience? The notion that because a software engineer is a techie, he or she thus can not relate to how other people interact with the system is deeply flawed. Good engineers work hard to make the system simple and usable. They think about customers all the time and do not try to invent convoluted stuff that can only be understood and appreciated by geeks.

8. Writes Maintainable Code

The other secret of good engineers is that it takes the same amount of time to write good code as it does to write bad code. A disciplined engineer thinks about the maintainability and evolution of the code from its first line. There is never any reason to write ugly code, a method that spawns multiple pages, or code with cryptic variable names. Rockstars write code which follows naming conventions, code which is compact, simple and not overly clever. Each line of code serves its purpose and resides in the right place. The bits that are difficult to understand are commented, but otherwise naming conventions are clear. Expressive names for methods and variables can make the code self-explanatory.

9. Can Code in Any Language

A good engineer might have a favorite programming language but is never religious about it. There are many great programming languages these days and to say that you only can code in one of them is to demonstrate a lack of versatility. In Java, C#, or C++ you can write any modern software. You can code the back end of any web site in PHP, in Perl, or in Ruby. At the end of the day, the language does not matter as much as the libraries that come with it. A good engineer knows that and is willing and able to learn new languages, new libraries and new ways of building systems.

10. Knows Basic Computer Science

The last, but certainly not the least trait of a great engineer is a solid foundation. A good engineer might not have a degree in computer science but must know the basics - data structures and algorithms. How can you build large scale software without knowing what a hashtable is? Or the difference between a linked list and an array? These are the basics that everyone should know. And the algorithms are just as important - from binary search to different sorts to graph traversals, a rockstar engineer must know and internalize the basics. These foundations are necessary to make the right design decisions when building any modern piece of software.

Conclusion

There are many traits that distinguish great software engineers. Among the ones we discussed, passion is certainly very important. Knowing the basics like code reuse, design patterns, fundamental data structures, and algorithms is necessary, while agile practices of refactoring and unit testing help engineers iteratively evolve complex software. Most importantly, rockstar engineers believe in simplicity and common sense. It is these beliefs that help them succeed in building the seemingly impossible, complex software systems that are necessary in today's world.

Let us know what other traits you think a rockstar software engineer should have, in the comments below.

In no particular order, but loosely categorized, my favorites of '07 were:

I used to be Bloglines' biggest fan. I still love what they're doing, especially since Eric Engleman came on board and re-energized development. But Google Reader has been my favourite RSS Reader throughout 2007, thanks to their continued innovation and experimentation. But the great thing about this space is that innovation is back: Google forced Bloglines' hand, but the Bloglines Beta is encouraging. Newsgator has never really stopped innovating and it's only the fact that I prefer a browser-based Reader that's prevented me from becoming a Newsgator fanatic.

One new RSS Reader to watch is fav.or.it, which is doing some innovative work including integrating comments. Also keep an eye on Streamy and FeedEachother (our review).

See 2007: The Year in RSS for more details on this market.

Start Page: Pageflakes, Netvibes

I use them both because they are fine products, well designed and always ahead of the curve in comparison with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo's similar offerings.

iGoogle does offer more gadgets, but the slick UI and constant developments in Pageflakes and Netvibes is what keeps those two at the top of my list of start pages.

Tech News: Techmeme, Original Signal

Techmeme is well known amongst tech bloggers and readers, quite simply because it's second to none in keeping up with tech news. Aggregating news on a single page, ordering it and having it constantly catching scoops as they happen - it's very hard to pull that off. Many have tried (TailRank, Megite, etc), but none have become daily addictions like Techmeme has for me.

Original Signal is another that I use a lot. It is a useful aggregation service of popular links, in a variety of categories. It's a very simple idea, but nicely implemented (with previews, ability to re-order, etc).

Online Music: last.fm

Without a doubt the best online music service, at least according to a comparison test we did earlier this year. I frequently use last.fm during the working week, and it never fails to throw up great new artists that I'd not heard before.

Pandora is also fine, but unfortunately it's inaccessible to me as I live outside the US. Grooveshark is one to keep an eye on (or an ear on!). Amie Street is another good, DRM-free source of online music (our review). See also ReadWriteWeb's Online Music Week for more recommendations.

Web Office: Google Docs, Zoho

I use both sets of Web Office suites on a regular basis, to collaborate with others on documents - or even by myself, simply because it is so practical to do word processing or spreadsheets in the browser (I don't have much call to do powerpoints). I even tried to use exclusively Web Office for a period in 2007, instead of Microsoft Office. This was because I'd gotten a new Mac and decided to see how long I'd last without MS Office. It lasted a few months, but in the end I got frustrated with little things like slow UI and lack of some of the advanced features in MS Office.

I'm sure that Web Office suites will compete better with MS Office over the coming years, but for now they are excellent complements to the desktop suites.

Project Mgmt: Basecamp

I simply can't live without this product now. We use it at ReadWriteWeb, for team messaging, collaboration on projects, To Do lists, and more. It's also one of the relatively rare web apps that I actually pay for (gasp! what a concept!).

Web Email: Gmail

I've spoken many times about how I love the 'web native' functionality of Gmail. It has performance issues at times (even going down for half a day early in the year), but overall it remains my number 1 email account.

Yahoo Mail is still the number 1 worldwide, and Windows Live Hotmail has millions of users too. I also tried Thunderbird during the year. But none was able to even come close to enticing me to ditch Gmail.

Social News: Digg, StumbleUpon

I use Digg a lot to monitor tech news - and of course it is an important traffic driver for tech blogs such as RWW. StumbleUpon is something I'm still getting used to, despite having been a user for a while now. By design it favors serindipity over tracking, which makes it different from most of the news services I use (digg, Techmeme, Google Reader, Pageflakes, etc). Still, it has an attraction to it - why else do I have the StumbleUpon toolbar on my browser? :-)

del.icio.us is something I use a lot too. Another one to keep an eye on is Sphinn, a small but influential social news site focused on search. And there is a new design coming for Propeller (ex-Netscape). Mixx is another getting rave reviews. So these may become regular visits for me in '08.

Reddit is another social news product worth mentioning, although I've always found its popular stories to be a bit on the frivolous side. Just my opinion.

Video, Photos: YouTube, Flickr

I'm not a huge user of online video, so YouTube still does the trick for me. I also like MyStrands (our review) and Current, the latter which released a stellar new design a couple of months ago. Joost is getting a lot of hype, but it wasn't something I found compelling in '07.

In photos, Flickr is another of those rare apps I pay for - which must mean it's good ;-)

Social Networks / Blogging: Facebook, MyBlogLog, Twitter, Tumblr

These are my most used social networking sites / micro-blogging services (I'm bundling them into the same category here, only because I personally use them all as social publishing tools).

Like a lot of people, for me Facebook started out 2007 as a relatively obscure US college student social network. However by the end of the year, everyone I know in the blogosphere was on it. But I have to also mention that MyBlogLog has become a very effective kind of social network for RWW readers - one of the reasons it survived the Great Widget Purge of the December RWW re-design.

LinkedIn is something I use often, if only to approve new business connections. Unfortunately Plaxo isn't doing it for me, even though I receive several connection requests each week now.

I'm a Twitter addict now (username is rww) and I've started to experiment using Tumblr as a personal blog.

Conclusion

So those are (some) of my most used web apps and sites. There are many others I use but didn't mention, in order to keep this post to a manageable length!

What were your favorite web sites and apps of '07? And what would you recommend that RWW readers use in 2008?

Image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid