The end of the year is typically a time for prediction posts. We have our own thoughts on what we expect the future to bring (which we will publish this week), but in this post we’ll take a look at what some of our friends are discussing about the Web. While not everyone offers a prediction for 2009, we hope their wishes for the future of the Web and their thoughts on what’s important right now inspire thought and discussion.

Chris Brogan Looks Forward to a ‘One Ring’ Profile

After asking some of the Web’s brightest minds to predict the future of social media, Peter Kim compiled Social Media Predictions 2009 [PDF]. One of the predictions is by Chris Brogan who believes that 2009 will bring an end to the fight over a single sign in system.

Moving beyond OpenID, we’ll have a sliced profile for social networks that will carry both our full profile plus the ability to break out specific segments for specific sites. I might not share my passion for beer on my church network, and I might not want to bring religion to my business social network.

There will be some kind of “one ring” profile that will allow data pass through to the various places that use it. The reason this hasn’t happened is that each company wants to own the database on the back end. Someone’s going to win in 2009.

Ionut Alex. Chitu talks Google in 2009

From the blog that watches Google’s attempts to move your OS online, Alex Chitu offers 16 predictions for Google in 2009. Here are our favorite three:

• Google’s search engine will lose a significant amount of market share as Live Search’s position will consolidate.
• OneGoogle – a new interface that merges all Google applications so you can quickly switch between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs without opening a new tab or losing your work.
• GrandCentral will be publicly available in the US and the interface will integrate with Gmail.

Dave Kellog Advises Corporate Bloggers to Get Real

Dave Kellogg, CEO of Mark Logic suggests that many corporations have latched onto the blogging phenomenon as a means to regurgitate their standard corporate messages. Blogging this way doesn’t work and if you’re considering doing it – don’t. As a CEO who has been blogging for over three years, Dave’s words are well worth noting; his blogging style is well worth emulating.

Dave’s recommendations:

• If you’re going to make a corporate blog, go real or go home.
• There is no point in ghost-written or PR-written blogs.
• In my view, corporate blogs shouldn’t exist. If you want a corporate blog, go find a few corporate bloggers instead.
• Encourage those bloggers to write openly and honestly about your industry.
• Let them ramble off-topic once in a while. You might discover something.

Om Malik: Tip’d Could Be a Daily Destination

Cautiously optimistic, Om sees great potential in the online community Tip’d, the site that brings together the best news on the Web relating to all things finance.

From Om’s post:

I find 3-5 headlines that grab my attention each day, of which maybe two are worth reading. Rarely do I find an article I would archive, as truly quality content is sparse. But this is a new service (it had 100,000 visitors in November, according to Compete), so I’m willing to be patient.

If it can get itself embedded into the financial blog ecosystem the way Digg has plugged in the tech world, Tip’d could become a daily destination.

Matt Mullenweg wants Blog Posts to Become More Interactive

Talking with Robert Scoble about Twitter and FriendFeed, Matt talks about the addictiveness of instant gratification, and how he’s looking forward to real time RSS and more interactive blog posts.

This is a partial transcript of the interview (at approx 03.33):

What I love about those two platforms is the instant gratification. You get that instant hit where people are replying to you right then, or you can drive a couple of hundred people to a link within 30 seconds. I think what they’ve done beautifully is the coupling of the writing and the reading.

RSS is fantastic but it’s a pull in technology. It’s not real time. And so for years people have been talking about making RSS real time. I think that I’d like to get to a point where Twitter and FriendFeed are mechanisms for this, where blog posts become a lot more interactive. Like when you do a blog post, there is no reason that as many people that see your Twitter within the first five minutes shouldn’t see your blog post in the first five minutes. But how it works now, is I go to my Google Reader twice a day and I see your new post – you don’t get that hit that we’re all becoming addicted to.

The complete video can be found here.

Duncan Riley: The Year of the Uber Blog and New Media

Duncan predicts that Uber blogs, blogs that combines different content streams into one large blog with one primary top level URL, will onclick="NGSubscriptionManager.TrackClickView('478106', '6706638464');">explode in 2009.

In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one URL.

The rise of the uber blog will also mark the beginning of the time new media starts to surpass old media.

Pew Internet and American Life Project: The Future of the Internet 2020

Rather than making predictions for 2009, the Pew Internet and American Life Project canvassed Internet specialists for their take on what we can expect in the year 2020.

Some of the predictions: The mobile phone will be the primary tool for connecting to the Internet; Voice recognition and touch technology will become more common, and Internet architecture will improve not by starting over, but by next-generation engineering of the network.

Source: TechDirt

The IPO market had almost entirely dried up already, before we reached financial meltdown in the second half of the year — and the resulting financial crisis certainly hasn’t made the IPO market any brighter. So, we certainly weren’t expecting to hear of any internet companies trying to go public… but it seems at least one company thinks that now’s the right time for an online porn company to go public. Apparently, Adult FriendFinder has filed to go public. The company, which used to be known as Penthouse Media Group until it bought the startup Adult Friendfinder not so long ago, is hoping to raise a bunch of money. I’d be surprised if this actually went anywhere. While some might claim that porn is always a growth market, it’s a highly competitive one, and often seen as a bit sketchy on the business side. Plus, the underwriters are a little known Russian investment bank. On top of all that, it’s looking to use the money not for expansion, but mostly to pay off debt. In this economic climate, with the current IPO window slammed pretty tightly shut, does anyone actually expect this one to go anywhere?

Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels?

Enlarge This Image

Alan Zale for The New York Times

Although Amazon will not disclose sales figures, the Kindle has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books.

The New York Times

For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity ofAmazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold.

The $359 Kindle, which is slim, white and about the size of a trade paperback, was introduced a year ago. AlthoughAmazon will not disclose sales figures, the Kindle has at least lived up to its name by creating broad interest in electronic books. Now it is out of stock and unavailable until February. Analysts credit Oprah Winfrey, who praised the Kindle on her show in October, and blame Amazon for poor holiday planning.

The shortage is providing an opening for Sony, which embarked on an intense publicity campaign for its Reader device during the gift-buying season. The stepped-up competition may represent a coming of age for the entire idea of reading longer texts on a portable digital device.

“The perception is that e-books have been around for 10 years and haven’t done anything,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading division. “But it’s happening now. This is really starting to take off.”

Sony’s efforts have been overshadowed by Amazon’s. But this month it began a promotional blitz in airports, train stations and bookstores, with the ambitious goal of personally demonstrating the Reader to two million people by the end of the year.

The company’s latest model, the Reader 700, is a $400 device with a reading light and a touch screen that allows users to annotate what they are reading. Mr. Haber said Sony’s sales had tripled this holiday season over last, in part because the device is now available in the Target, Borders and Sam’s Club chains. He said Sony had sold more than 300,000 devices since the debut of the original Reader in 2006.

It is difficult to quantify the success of the Kindle, since Amazon will not disclose how many it has sold and analysts’ estimates vary widely. Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book market research company, said he believed Amazon had sold as many as 260,000 units through the beginning of October, before Ms. Winfrey’s endorsement. Others say the number could be as high as a million.

Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Mr. Hildick-Smith said, and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds.

So far, publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that sales of e-books for any device — including simple laptop downloads — constitute less than 1 percent of total book sales. But there are signs of momentum. The publishers say sales of e-books have tripled or quadrupled in the last year.

Amazon’s Kindle version of “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski, a best seller recommended by Ms. Winfrey’s book club, now represents 20 percent of total Amazon sales of the book, according to Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide
.

The Kindle version of the book, which can be downloaded by the device itself through its wireless modem, costs $9.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. The Reader version costs $11.99 from Sony’s e-book library, accessible from an Internet-connected computer.

Even authors who were once wary of selling their work in bits and bytes are coming around. After some initial hesitation, authors like Danielle Steel and John Grisham are soon expected to add their titles to the e-book catalog, their agents say.

“E-books will become the go-to-first format for an ever-expanding group of readers who are newly discovering how much they enjoy reading books on a screen,” said Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books.

Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. Some of the most committed bibliophiles maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book. But the technology may have more appeal for particular kinds of people, like those who are the heaviest readers.

At Harlequin Enterprises, the Toronto-based publisher of bodice-ripping romances, Malle Vallik, director for digital content and interactivity, said she expected sales of digital versions of the company’s books someday to match or potentially outstrip sales in print.

Harlequin, which publishes 120 books a month, makes all of its new titles available digitally, and has even started publishing digital-only short stories that it sells for $2.99 each, including an erotica collection called Spice Briefs.

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year — and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them — came from Apple’s do-it-all gadget, the iPhone.

Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including BlackBerrys.

Publishers say these iPhone applications are already starting to generate nearly as many digital book sales as the Sony Reader, though they still trail sales of books in the Kindle format.

E Ink, the company in Cambridge, Mass., that has developed the screen technology for many of these companies, says it is testing color screens and hopes to introduce them by 2010.

Many book lovers are quite happy with today’s devices. MaryAnn van Hengel, 51, a graphic designer in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., once railed against e-readers at a meeting of her book club. But she embraced the Kindle her husband gave her this fall shortly after Ms. Winfrey endorsed it.

Ms. Van Hengel now has several books on the device, including a Nora Roberts novel andDoris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” She said the Kindle had spurred her to buy more books than she normally would in print.

“I may be shy bringing the Kindle to the book club because so many of the women were so against the technology, and I said I was too,” Ms. Van Hengel said. “And here I am in love with it.”

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Marketing firm HubSpot will publish a report tomorrow on the state of Twitter at the end of 2008, based on user data the company harvested from its controversial app TwitterGrader. Though the report’s methodology is not discussed, the numbers it includes are quite interesting. We draw our own conclusions based on those numbers below.

Days after Facebook posted some incredible new user numbers, it’s hard not to use that as the measuring stick. While the media has mentioned Facebook about 4X as many times as it has mentioned of Twitter in the last month – Facebook is not four times the size of Twitter. It is almost 30 times as big and growing much faster.

HubSpot estimates that Twitter has 4 to 5 million users, 30% of which are “brand new or unengaged.” They estimate that Twitter sees between five and ten thousand new accounts opened each day. That’s a nice number, but it’s far below, for example, Facebook’s astonishing 600k daily registrations and 140 million active users. Twitter is a fascinating little phenomenon – Facebook is mainstream.

Why is this important for users? Because most of the people you might really enjoy connecting with on Twitter are unlikely to ever use it. They are busy using Facebook instead.

Projecting Current Numbers

If Facebook stopped growing right now and Twitter’s numbers were at the upper end of Hubspot’s estimates (10k per day) – it would take 36 years for Twitter to catch up. [(135,000,000 more Facebook users / 10,000 new Twitter users per day) / 365 days per year = just about 37 years]

Facebook, on the other hand, grows another Twitter’s worth of new users every 8 days. This at a time when everyone from the President Elect to CNN to Shaquille O’Neil to Britney Spears is jumping on board Twitter!

Of course these conclusions require us to believe Facebook’s numbers and HubSpot’s numbers about Twitter. HubSpot has an economic interest in making Twitter look as big as possible, though, as it’s selling marketing services related to Twitter. (Disclosure: this author once did an hour of consulting for Hubspot, as well.)

The logical conclusion here appears to be that Twitter is numerically insignificant.

Other findings from HubSpot’s forthcoming report:

• 38% of Twitter users haven’t uploaded a photo of themselves to their profile. This is a far cry from Facebook or LinkedIn’s “verified identities” and closer to Digg’s bizarre world of juvenile freaks with random handles. The Digg model, by the way, is having a really hard time making any money.
• 22% of users have 0 to 5 followers. 9% of users haven’t even figured out that the point is to follow people on Twitter – they haven’t followed anyone at all.
• There are other numbers in the report that are interesting and not so negative. 20% of Twitter users have joined in the last 60 days, HubSpot says. That means Twitter is, since the end of October, on a pace to double in just under a year.
• Twitter appears to be used primarily for communicating in small groups. 30% of users are following 5 or fewer other people, 78% are following 50 or fewer.

Our take away? We love Twitter, we use it all day long. It’s a fascinating little technology that’s interesting to watch and use. It’s image far outweighs its numbers, though, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to change soon.

Source: TechDirt

The history of social-networking sites has largely been dominated by two trends: first, no matter how popular a site seems to be at any given moment, it’s probably living on borrowed time. Second, no matter how much traffic a site pulls in, it’s going to have a really hard time monetizing it. While the likes of Facebook and MySpace have resisted the former thus far, the latter remains a big problem — as it has been for some time. Given this history, it’s hardly surprising to see an NYT story this week about how little success marketers are having on sites like Facebook. They’re finding that banner ads get ignored (again, unsurprising), while their efforts to do “social advertising” aren’t bearing much fruit. The article mentions the Facebook page for Procter & Gamble’s 2x Ultra Tide laundry detergent, which has attracted 471 fans, and 9 responses thus far to the question “Your Favorite Place to Get Stained?” It’s hard to imagine what the P&G; marketers expected, but it really doesn’t seem surprising that people wouldn’t flock to affiliate themselves with some laundry detergent. While some brands do attract that kind of attention, overall, the evidence says that people don’t necessarily have a lot of interest in using social-networking sites to interact with brands, while many social-media efforts by companies aren’t trusted and are seen as little more than shilling.

This is a big problem for social-networking sites as they continue to struggle to justify their massive valuations with real revenues. Part of the problem seems to be the marketers’ mindset and how they see social networking or blogging as some magic sauce that will instantly boost sales and gloss over bad products. The challenge facing Facebook and its ilk is twofold. The sites need to better develop their marketing offerings beyond ineffective banner ads, but do so in a way that doesn’t annoy users and trample their privacy, as they’ll end up doing more to damage their advertisers’ brands than boost them. But the bigger challenge is changing marketers’ mindsets and getting them to understand how best to interact with users online. While the sites might see their role solely as selling advertising space, they must be the ones to take a leadership role and help educate and enlighten marketers, if only to help ensure their own survival.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

There was lots of activity in the digital lifestyle space in 2008, with new devices, services, and platforms being launched and some of our favorites from last year getting significant updates. One notable trend throughout the year was the way these products and services began to converge; not in the sense that they were becoming all-in-one devices, although some of that was happening, but rather by hardware, services, and content playing together nicely, often through open standards and platforms, with the Internet acting as a conduit. On that note, here are our picks of the 10 best digital lifestyle products of 2008.

1. The App Store

The real upgrade to the iPhone this year wasn’t the iPhone 3G but the accompanying App Store. Launched just five months ago, the store now offers over 10,000 third-party apps, and Apple has seen over 300 million downloads. Part of that success can be attributed to the way in which the iPhone as a platform has galvanized developers; a second major factor is the simplicity of the App Store itself. As a result, lots of our other favorite digital lifestyle-related products and services wound up on the iPhone and iPod Touch, such as Pandora and Last.fm (digital music), Joost (Internet TV), Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (social web), as well as location-based services, games, remotes (VLC Player and Sonos), and much, much more.

See also: The real surprise of the App Store isn’t number of downloads or revenue

2. Netflix

When Netflix starting talking up plans to deliver its online streaming service, Watch Instantly, to “Internet-connected high-definition DVD players, Internet-connected game consoles, and dedicated Internet set-top boxes,” we were a little skeptical, especially of the time frame. However, the company really delivered in 2008: Netflix streaming is now available on TiVo, the XBox 360, Internet-connected DVD players from LG and Samsung, along with the Roku Netflix Player set-top box.

3. Android

Our initial review of the first Google phone, T-Mobile’s G1, was mixed, but the Android OS had us pretty excited. “Without a doubt, the Android operating system is spectacular,” last100’s Daniel Langendorf wrote at the time. “It’s fast, with little or no lag time. It’s responsive, fun to use, and full of promise.” A few months on and we’re still impressed. In particular, Android’s mobile web browser is the best post-iPhone one yet. And likewise, the Android Market does a great job of copying the iPhone’s App Store. Of course, the best thing about Android is that it’s open source; as a result, we’ll see it powering numerous new smartphones next year, along with other hardware, such as set-top boxes, MIDs, and GPS devices.

4. Nokia E71

In our extensive review, we described Nokia’s E71 as our favorite smartphone yet. So, admittedly, this one is a very personal choice. The E71 is roughly the same size as the iPhone but has a completely different form-factor, omitting touch for a more traditional user interface and with enough room to pack in a compact but very usable QWERTY keyboard. Other pluses are the device’s overall responsiveness, bundled applications, and a number of welcome improvements to the S60 line’s user interface, along with decent web browsing and media playback, superb call quality, and extremely good battery life.

5. Hulu

Although online video site Hulu was available in private beta in 2007, it didn’t launch publicly until March of this year. Our initial verdict was mixed, but since then the Fox and NBC joint venture has become the third biggest video destination in the U.S., according to Nielsen. Perhaps a testament to that success, a number of device makers have released set-top boxes marketed on their ability to put Hulu content on the TV, such as ZeeVee’s recently announced PC-to-TV solution, the ZvBox, and the Neuros LINK. Now, if only Hulu would release an iPhone app or, like Netflix, form official partnerships with consumer electronics companies.

6. BBC iPlayer

Hulu could certainly learn a thing or two from the iPlayer, the BBC’s TV catch-up service (UK only). Since its controversial Windows launch, when the public broadcaster was accused of getting too close to Microsoft, the iPlayer has added streaming for the Mac and Linux, a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch, numerous other portable media players, and support for the latest phones running Windows Mobile. There’s also an iPlayer application for select Nokia phones and a browser-based version optimized for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

7. PlayStation 3

Sony’s PlayStation 3 wasn’t launched in 2008, but it certainly came of age this year. The company has always pitched the PS3 as a device that goes far beyond gaming. Instead, like Microsoft’s XBox 360, it’s designed to be a trojan horse in the living room, delivering a range of non-gaming content and services through the television. On that front, Sony made significant progress in 2008 by winning the next-generation format war with Blu-ray, adding DVR functionality in the UK with PlayTV, launching a video download store in the U.S., adding support for DivX video, and, finally, rolling out its own virtual world called Home.

8. Songbird

After being in development for two years, the open-source desktop music player Songbird reached its 1.0 release this month. What sets Songbird apart from the likes of iTunes is the array of available plug-ins that extend the app’s functionality. For example, mashTape, one of six default add-ons, let’s you delve into artist info, discography, links, and news and scroll through Flickr photos and YouTube videos. Other add-on services that ship with the player out of the box are Last.fm, Concerts, and SHOUTcast radio. With these installed, you can sync your tracks to Last.fm’s online service, check out upcoming concerts in the area, and stream music over the Internet using the player. As of publication, there are over 70 plug-ins available for Songbird.

See also: ReadWriteWeb’s full Songbird review.

9. Wii Fit

Nintendo has long contended that “everyone’s a gamer,” and now the console giant wants everyone to get fit. Announced last year but released in 2008, the Wii Fit aims to improve the health of family members through the kind of active play first seen in Wii Sports. The “game” comes with a balance board that assists with aerobic, toning, and balancing activities. A neat feature is that household members can review each other’s progress on a new Wii channel.

10. The Netbook

This isn’t an individual product but a whole new product category that has really taken off in 2008. Initially targeted to the education market and those wanting a third machine, netbooks are resonating with a much broader market — and not just because of their lower price point compared to more traditional, higher spec’ed sub-notebooks. Despite years of industry propaganda, consumers are wising up to the fact that they don’t have to step on the processor upgrade treadmill. Instead, in an age when more and more of our applications and data reside in the cloud (on remote servers, rather than local computers), a machine with Internet connectivity and powerful enough to run a modern web browser (a netbook, in other words) is often all we need.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Looking back on 2008, we can definitely call it the year of the Mobile Web. That designation, in large part, is due to the success of the iPhone. Although the iPhone was originally launched in 2007, it wasn’t until mid-2008 that the 3G version debuted, bringing with it the faster internet speeds that finally made the device a usable mobile computing platform.

There is no doubt that the iPhone led to a trickle-down effect that influenced nearly every aspect of both handset development and the mobile web itself. Every manufacturer is looking for an “iPhone killer,” everyone is dong an app store, and web sites themselves are becoming iPhone-friendly. Meanwhile, mobile app developers are reaping the rewards of having a new platform on which they can develop.

That being said, we can’t ignore the fact that other phones have made a big impact this year as well. Most notably, we have Android, Google’s new mobile OS, first launched on the T-Mobile G1 and now coming to a very Blackberry-esque device in Australia. Thanks to Android’s open source version, the question of how it will compare to iPhone has a simple answer: Android is open where the iPhone is closed.

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

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

With the above thoughts in mind, as we look back at the best mobile apps from 2008, we can’t help but notice how iPhone apps top the list. Still, we’ve tried to include apps here that aren’t iPhone-only so that we can deliver a truly well-rounded list. If we missed your favorite app (and surely we did – these lists are always subjective), let us know in the comments. Also, please note that we chose not to include games on this list – at this point, that’s a whole other category.

1. Twitter

Without a doubt, Twitter is one of the best social networks to use on your mobile device. You can update your status, send replies, and engage in 140-character conversations from the palm of your hand by way of any number of mobile applications or even via SMS (in some countries, that is). However, it’s hard to pick a clear winner in the category of best mobile Twitter application. Depending on your platform, there are multiple apps available and everyone has their own personal favorite.

In an informal poll on Twitter and FriendFeed, we saw some applications received more votes than others. Those included Twitterberry, which is the Twitter app for Blackberry it seems, and Tiny Twitter was popular among Windows Mobile users. For the iPhone, things were more complicated. There are several different applications available, but we noticed that TwitterFon and Tweetie got the most votes. Plus, the newer app Tweetsville is worth mentioning, too, as it has been getting a lot of buzz lately.

Earlier this year, we had polled the blogosphere on the same subject and found then that the top mobile app for Twitter was Hahlo. Only a few months later, and so much has changed. It seems that as new Twitter apps are released, mobile Twitter users rush to try them and often end up with a new favorite du jour. What ends up being your favorite app in the long run has a lot to do with personal preference as well as how you user Twitter. Power users may find the apps with more features to be the best, while casual users might prefer a more simplified interface. In t
he end, what’s most telling about this trend to tweet from our mobiles is that it’s not about one particular application. Instead, what’s important is that nearly everyone is tweeting. That makes Twitter itself the mobile winner, no matter which application you use to interact with it.

Read some of our top Twitter articles from this past year:

How We Use Twitter for Journalism

The Rise of Twitter as a Platform for Serious Discourse

How To Get Customer Service Via Twitter

2. FFtoGo

Let’s face it, we’re social media addicts, and this year, no other social network has been discussed quite as much as FriendFeed. Initially, there was concern that FriendFeed was relocating the conversations that used to take place on blogs and moving them elsewhere. The conversation has left the blogosphere, we cried. Not only that, but FriendFeed’s stream of updates began to overwhelm even the best of us. It just became so noisy that the service began to lose its original luster after a while. But then things started to change. FriendFeed implemented dupe detection and bloggers (like us!) found ways to integrate it with their commenting mechanisms. When FriendFeed implemented lists in late August, we were sold. FriendFeed finally became more manageable and thus, more fun.

Of course, we didn’t want to give up FriendFeed just because we were going to be away from our computers. That’s where the mobile application FriendFeedToGo came in. Thanks to developer Benjamin Golub, we were given FFtoGo.com, a mobile interface for FriendFeed that soon became the interface of choice, even over the company’s own iPhone version. Needless to say, those at FriendFeed knew a good thing when they saw one and soon swooped up Benjamin to join the rest of the FriendFeeders in downtown Mountain View, California. We couldn’t have been more pleased.

3. Google Maps

What’s one of the most important applications you need on a mobile phone? Maps! And when it comes down to it, the application of choice is Google Maps. This year, we saw Google launch their own mobile OS, code-named Android, and with it came one of the coolest applications we had yet seen: Google Maps with Street View for Mobile.

In September, Google updated their Google Maps for Mobile application, which brought Street View to non-Android phones including Blackberry and those phones powered by Java. There was only one glaring omission: the iPhone. Thankfully, iPhone owners finally received Street View, too, with the iPhone 2.2. firmware update, released in November. Google also released a mobile app with voice recognition that same month. These developments came much to the relief of iPhone users who had previously worried that Google was going to only release their coolest apps for Android. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

Speaking of Google, we should also note that many of you said you couldn’t live without your other Google apps, either. Google Reader and Gmail were also hugely popular apps across all mobile platforms this year.

4. Fring

The popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring lets you access and interact with your social networks on the go, make free calls, and chat with your friends over IM – what more could you want in a mobile app? The service supports Skype, Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger), Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo!, and AIM, and all are made available over your phone’s internet connection. With the Fring app, you can see who’s online, have multiple conversations at once, and even send and receive files with your friends

Fring also launched an Application Programming Interface (API) earlier this year that offers the Fring mobile interface, IM, presence indication, file transfer and other features to developers seeking to build apps in standard server-side languages. Thanks to the fringAPI™, you can access an ever-expanding group of Fring add-ons including ones for Facebook, Gmail Notifier, Vtap Video Streaming, Orkut’s Social Network, Yandex Push Email, and more.

Fring has long been a favorite app for iPhone – it was one of the top apps for jailbroken phones prior to the launch of the iPhone SDK. Strangely, though, there was a long delay between the July 11th opening of the iPhone app store and the October 2008 launch of the official Fring iPhone app.

It’s also worth noting that Fring isn’t an iPhone-only application – it’s supported on a large number of handsets from many different carriers. To see if yours is supported go to m.fring.com.

5. Brightkite

Yes, the mobile social network Brightkite includes an iPhone app, but it’s much more than a toy for the exclusive club of iPhone owners. The service, a device agnostic, SMS-based application, lets you “check in” at various locations out in the real world and then see who else is there, has been there, and who is nearby. You can check in via text, web,or iPhone, but text is easiest if you’re using a traditional cell phone.

After checking in, you can post updates in a Twitter-like fashion and upload photos to your Brightkite-enabled stream, available at a URL in the format of brightkite.com/people/username. The newly launched “Wall” feature makes Brightkite ideal for conferences and live events as it allows anyone to display the live stream of notes, photos, and checkins at any one place in a large, full screen view that can be shown on any monitor, projector, or TV.

Brightkite isn’t on this list because it’s hugely successful in terms of numbers – it’s here because of its potential. There’s still some debate as to whether consumers really want new and separate social networks just for the mobile phone. As we noted back in October, no other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, had even reached 15% adoption. That means Brightkite and others like it still have a way to go before they become a solid part of the new mobile web. However, if any of these apps have a chance for success, it’s Brightkite. With the service’s Twitter integration and live event niche, they offer something unique.

Brightkite’s best competition comes from a similar app called Loopt, also a cross-platform tool. Loopt is popular with iPhone users – it made the list of top iPhone apps this year. We think Loopt’s Android version is interesting, too, because it works in the background automatically checking you in as you travel from place to place. However, although Loopt is available on numerous phones and carriers in the U.S., Brightkite works on all phones. Also, whether people want an app with more automated tracking (like Loopt) or more control (like Brightkite) is yet to be seen.

As with any new application, Brightkite is still waiting to achieve critical mass. It’s not mainstream yet, but it’s definitely worth watching in 2009.

6. Pandora

There are a number of apps for streaming radio from your phone, but Pandora is definitely one of the best. The app is based on the Music Genome Project, an effort to categorize and analyze the details about each song in existence – including its melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics, etc. – in order to help you find more songs that are like the music you like. To do this, you just listen to some music using Pandora and rate your preferences. Pandora then suggests more songs you might enjoy. If you have diverse tastes, you can even create different Pandora channels – like one for upbeat hip-hop songs and one for your love of classical piano, for example.

Pandora’s mobile application works on a number of different handsets from both Sprint and AT&T;, including, of course, the iPhone.

7. Shazam

We have to give a shout-out to one other music-based application in addition to Pandora: Shazam. This clever mobile application helps you identify the song you’re hearing by having you hold up the phone to the source of the music, most often the radio. The app then “listens” to the song and identifies it for you. Shazam is available both on iPhone and Android, as well as other handsets if you happen to live in the UK.

You may be surprised to learn that Shazam wasn’t the first application that could identify songs from your phone. Gracenote’s MusicID technology has been around for ages, but it didn’t have the easy-to-use UI of the Shazam iPhone application. That simplicity combined with the popularity of the iPhone in general, makes Shazam an app worthy of a download…and worthy of its own iPhone commercial, too, it seems.

8. Opera Mini/Mobile

The popular mobile browser from Opera is always one to watch. Having launched a software developers kit (SDK) for widgets this year, there’s a chance for this mobile browser to take on the powerhouse that is the iPhone through its freely developed and distributed widgets that run within the company’s mobile browser on any number of handsets.

The company is already far ahead of rival Mozilla Firefox, whose mobile browser code-named Fennec is still under development. Meanwhile, Opera’s mobile browser is already being shipped on millions of handsets from major mobile manufacturers including HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and more. The browser is also available for different types of mobile operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, Bla
ckberry, and Linux, making it the alternative browser of choice for many handset owners.

There are actually two mobile version of Opera – Opera Mobile for smartphones and Opera Mini for everything else. It’s great that even low-end phones, which are all some folks can afford, can now include a better browser thanks to Opera Mini. Meanwhile, with Opera Mobile’s features like offline browsing, built-in productivity tools, tabbed browsing, and the above-mentioned widgets, the next-gen mobile web experience is available to a wide range of devices.

However, one place you won’t see Opera anytime soon is the iPhone. Although there was some buzz about an Opera iPhone app, if one even exists, it does so in violation of the SDK and would never get app store approval. Widgets would also make it somewhat of a competitor to the App Store itself, and that usually means a reject notice, if history tells us anything. If you ever see Opera on the iPhone, it will most likely be a jailbroken phone. We would still like to see that!

Read More Opera Coverage:

Opera Mobile News (mobile browser for smartphones): Opera Mobile 9.5 Unveiled

Opera Mini News (Opera mobile browser): coverage of both the Opera 4.1 and 4.2 releases

9. NYTimes iPhone App

For mobile news on the go, we’re big fans of what the New York Times has done with their iPhone application. This is a great example of what the newspapers of tomorrow can and should look like, if you ask us. You can view the most popular stories of the day or flip through the various sections of the paper with a flip of your finger. Articles are accompanied by full-color photos, too.

Although there are other mobile news applications out there, we’ve been excited all year about the initiatives that the Times is taking in attempt to stay relevant in today’s digital age. For example, in October, the company launched their first API, making them a news broker just as much as they are a newspaper. More recently, they opened up their front page to outside content, an effort that helps blur the lines between news and blogs even further. We think that NY Times sets a great example for other old media companies trying to embrace the internet age…we only hope that it’s not too late.

Disclosure: RWW is syndicated by the New York Times.

10. i.TV

The i.TV iPhone/iPod Touch application, lets you view the latest TV and movie schedules from your area right on your mobile device. You can also rate shows, leave reviews, and recommend shows to others. The app was ranked as one of the top apps in the iTunes App Store 2008 list, too, coming in a #3 on the list of free entertainment applications.

i.TV just keeps improving, too. Last month, they added Netflix to the app, which lets you search the Netflix database, manage your queue, and add movies and shows to your instant watch queue for instant streaming on your Windows PC, Xbox 360, Roku box, TiVo® Series3, TiVo HD, or TiVo HD XL digital video recorders and select Blu-Ray players. They also integrated with Wikipedia in order to link to articles about shows, movies, and actors within i.TV. Best of all, it’s free.

This app is one of the only ones we listed that’s iPhone/iPod Touch-only, but it was worth including because of its simple, straightforward nature and the useful service it provides. i.TV appeals to everyone – even mainstream users, which is probably what makes it so popular. We agree it deserves the success it has received. i.TV has rapidly become one of our most-used apps this year, even worthy of placement on our iPhone’s homescreen.

From ReadWriteWeb

RSS and syndication are the veins that the new social web flows through. Countless products and services have been built on top of RSS in the past few years but there are always a few that stand above the rest.

As part of this year’s Top 10 Products series, we offer below the Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008. These are the feed tools we and the people we know use day in and day out – we love them, we hate them, we wouldn’t want to work without them.

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

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008

About the Selections

These aren’t all new products from 2008. They are the products in the RSS and syndication world that we think made the biggest impact or were the most useful.

To be honest, this was not a particularly good year for innovation in the RSS space. Too many of the products listed below are incumbents, several of which drove us crazy this year. They remain on the list, however, because they are incredibly useful and nothing topped them.

Some honorable mentions are deserved as well. We talked to many people who like RSS magazine-style start page Feedly, though we found it overly constrictive and don’t feel that it’s made a big market splash yet. We also found the Associated Press’s AP Member Marketplace very interesting. Had we gotten a chance to get to know it better, it could very well have been on this list. Finally, we love African social media aggregator Afrigator – it’s a great way to learn about what’s happening all over the continent and it’s a great use of RSS. We named it one of the Top 10 International Products of 2008 but we think it deserves an honorable mention in this category as well.

And Now the RWW Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008

Postrank

Formerly known as AideRSS, Postrank is simply the most useful RSS related application we’ve seen in a long time. Plug in any RSS feed and Postrank will rate each item in the feed on a scale of 1 to 10, by number of comments, inbound links, saves in Delicious, etc. You can then subscribe to a filtered feed of just the 10% most popular items in that feed.

We use Postrank all the time, in all kinds of contexts: from monitoring break-out stories in niche markets we don’t follow closely, to finding out about the bread and butter of new blogs we discover to running search feeds through Postrank to surface hot conversations on any topic.

Postrank has been around for about a year and a half, but we write about it over and over again.

This year Postrank opened an API, made a bunch of deals with other companies, improved its service, raised a round of funding and just generally rocked.

FriendFeed

Social “life streaming” service FriendFeed is making syndication a more social activity than anything else has yet. The service aggregates your activity data from all around the web, lets your friends comment on it and shows you the activities of all your friends’ friends when someone you know comments on something and exposes it to their network.

If RSS readers will change your life and work through their awesome usefulness, FriendFeed is a service that makes syndication fun. It’s one of the first places we go on the web every morning.

We interviewed the ex-Googlers who founded FriendFeed last February and that interview is still the best place to learn how the service works under the hood.

If you’d like to connect with the ReadWriteWeb crew on FriendFeed (and we hope you will) we’ve posted a tour of our FriendFeed profile pages here. Please join us also in the ReadWriteWeb FriendFeed Room.

Gnip

Gnip is a social media ping server, a service that other services ask for user data updates from all around the web. There’s nothing here for users, but almost every developer we talk to these days who is aggregating content in order to add value to it (and that is the name of the game) has Gnip on its radar. The company aims to make aggregation more timely, scalable and efficient than it is today.

We wrote about Gnip at length when the service launched in July.

Snackr

Snackr is a simple little RSS ticker built in Adobe AIR. Its f
renetic and unstopping delivery of news is too much for many people, but the rest of us love it. It’s where our eyes wander during page loads and other down times. Many of the stories you read here at ReadWriteWeb were based on things we first caught wind of through Snackr.

Snackr was built in-house at Adobe by Flex team member Narciso Jaramillo. We reviewed it in May and have been using it ever since.

Google Reader

Google Reader is the market leader in full featured RSS readers, having pulled ahead of the troubled Bloglines in recent months. This year Google Reader has made their sharing feature much more transparent, added the ability to translate any feed into a number of different languages and recently redesigned.

It hasn’t been a super exciting year for the product, and there are still basic problems like very infrequent caching of rare feeds, but Google Reader’s incredible dominance in the field makes it a required part of this list.

Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script

One of the simplest little changes we’ve made to our browsers lately is the addition of this greasemonkey script that shows the number of readers in Google Reader that any page’s RSS feed has. You can usually multiply that number by 2 to 4 times for an estimate of how many total readers a feed has across all readers, but either way it’s a great little indication of a site’s popularity.

The script was written by an anonymous user named “uncv” and we’d like to thank them. We love what they’ve done! This was one of the 7 coolest browser tweaks from the last month that we wrote about earlier this week. It’s already won a permanent place in our hearts!

Dapper

Dapper.net is a point and click interface for data extraction – a nice way to say scraping an RSS feed. We continue to depend on Dapper for all kinds of research, we’re always finding new ways to use it around here. We love it.

Unfortunately, some sites don’t like us to have access to links back to them available in our RSS readers (like Facebook, for example) and that really upsets us. In many cases those feeds that we created ourselves are the only way we’d be drawn back to a site, so it’s their loss as much as ours.

Dapper has been around since 2006, but they recently launched a semantic ad platform that we included in our list of the top 10 semantic web products of 2008.

Twitterfeed

Love it or hate it, Twitterfeed has made a big impact on the web in 2008. It’s the service people use to publish an RSS feed right into Twitter.

Some people argue that twitter is all about conversation and that publishing an RSS feed there is grating and inappropriate. We like getting our local newspaper story links on Twitter, though, and everything from disaster monitoring to traffic conditions are now available via Twitterfeed.

Feedburner

Google’s RSS publishing service Feedburner hurt our ability to break news first, can’t be used in many corporate environments because it gets blocked in China and only made 6 posts all year to its company blog, none since May. That’s compared to 28 posts in 2007. Apparently once you get your Google money there’s not much point in communicating with the people who depend on you every day.

Why would we call Feedburner one of the top 10 RSS products on the year then? Because despite how frustrating it can be, the service is still so incredibly useful that we don’t know what we’d do without it. Not just for publishing and analytics for ReadWriteWeb feeds – from numbers to email delivery to FeedFlare links, Feedburner will work magic easily on any feed you work with. I’ve got 68 different feeds in my account and I’ll probably publish several more before the year is up.

Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is another RSS based service that is really frustrating, hasn’t innovated substantially in the last year – but is still so powerfully useful that it deserves a spot as one of the top products in this market.

Splicing and filtering RSS feeds is the simplest thing to do with Pipes, but there’s much more you can do with it as well. It’s great for us pseudo-geeks, we can work all kinds of magic with it. We’ve used Pipes throughout the year to do things that we (ok I) don’t have the technical chops to do otherwise. For that I thank the Pipes team a whole lot.