In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – the first and still the best weekly newsletter for tech news and reviews – we present our end-of-year series profiling the best web products of 2009. We tell you our picks for Best Mobile Apps, Best Consumer Apps, Best Semantic Web Apps, and more. Also in this weekly wrapup, we take a look at Facebook’s new privacy controls, and ask whether Google and Yahoo! are giving away too much control over user identities to Facebook and Twitter. As well, we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).
Plus: this week we released our new premium report, about the Real-Time Web!
Order Our New Premium Report
This week, we launched our newest premium report: The Real-Time Web and its Future. To create this report, we conducted interviews with 50 companies and individuals that drive innovation in real-time technology. The first copies of the report went out on Monday, and here’s what some of the first readers had to say about it:
“The report is excellent – a great synthesis of why the real time web is different, what changes, what doesn’t and what the industry needs to do in order to press forward.”
– John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks
“Recommended.”
-Hewlett-Packard Official News
“Fresh… Great information. Not the same old same old stories that we’ve all heard.”
– C.C. Chapman
“…all there is to know”
– The Next Web
We’re flattered by the initial praise, and we hope you’ll check out the report for yourself! Take a look at the Table of Contents and this sample chapter, and keep an eye out for the 2-report package that allows you to save money on previous reports when you buy our latest installment.
Web Products
In what’s become an annual tradition, over December ReadWriteWeb will present our ‘best of’ posts for 2009. These are a series of 10 articles that will examine the top web products in categories ranging from consumer web apps to RSS and syndication platforms. Our first 5 articles went up this week…
Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009
We kicked off the series with a look at the top mobile web products of the past year. This is a subjective list of editorially selected products, but one which includes some of the biggest names in mobile web applications for 2009.
Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009
Every year at ReadWriteWeb, we look at hundreds of new web apps aimed at everyday users. Occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web. Here is our list of the top 10 consumer web apps of 2009.
Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009
2009 has seen a lot of Semantic Web and structured data activity. Much of it has been driven by Linked Data, a W3C project which gained momentum this year. The 10 products we’ve picked out for this end-of-year review are ones that have done interesting things with data. Connecting to other data, building new applications with data, sharing data, and more.
Top 10 International Web Products of 2009
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.
Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009
The web isn’t about pages any more. Now it’s about streams, feeds and syndication. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year.
Your Favorite Mobile Apps: Facebook, Tweetie, Google Maps, Foursquare, and More
Last week we surveyed you, the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top five mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! In this post we reveal the full results. We discovered that you like social networking on the go (Facebook, Foursquare), Twitter clients (Tweetie, Twitterrific), Google (Google Maps, Google Mobile), and innovative mobile-focused apps (Evernote, Shazam).
Amazon Announces Record Sales For Kindle While B&N Misses Deadline
Amazon announced this week that November was its best month ever for Kindle sales. According to Amazon, the $259 Kindle is the “most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon.” Barnes & Noble is also seeing strong demand for its new nook e-reader, but is unable to fulfill current orders before Christmas. The company has also delayed shipments to its stores until December 7.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
ReadWriteEnterprise
Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0’ and using social software inside organizations.
Microsoft: Office Web Apps for your Mobile – Let the Confusion Begin
What exactly from Office Web Apps and Office Mobile 2010 can you use on your mobile right now and what will be available when the product ships next spring? We take a sky high look and see if we can make sense of things, so you know what to do if you when giving Office a try on the mobile.
ReadWriteStart
Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
How Startup Companies Can Change the World
While startup companies are often asked about their monetization and member strategies, it’s rare that they’re asked how they plan on changing the world. At this week’s Supernova Conference in San Francisco, speakers attacked the subject of social chance and how it applies to business models, technological expertise and mass distribution.
SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL
Web Trends
Identity Wars: Google & Yahoo! Bow to Facebook & Twitter
Yahoo! announced this week that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. Also Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web. We’re worried that the Royalty of the web’s last generation has crowned these two leading social networks as the Royalty of the current generation in a deal that offers traffic and money, but that could suffocate the most creative developments of the open, distributed web.
It’s official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win. Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn’t play nicely with Gears, a Google rep confirmed the company has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn’t yet ready and isn’t supported by commercially available browsers.
How Facebook’s New Privacy Changes Will Affect You
In a late night post on Facebook’s company blog, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a round of upcoming changes that will affect all users of the social network. Specifically, the changes focus on new privacy controls for information sharing. For Facebook’s user base, now 350 million strong, the updates represent a major overhaul as to how privacy is handled on the site.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
