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. 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.
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Some of these apps aren't new - but just like last year, we've tried to select a mix of applications that either reached the mainstream this year, or that we think will be big in the year to come.
This is the second part in our series of top products of 2009:
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.
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.
Wedding dances, dancing babies, Kanye West, broken guitars and a crowdsourced music video. These are the top 5 most embedded and linked to videos of this summer. Social media analytics and tracking firm Sysomos just posted an extensive report about how bloggers use videos on their sites. One part of this report looked at the most popular videos that were embedded or linked to from blogs between July and September 2009.
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We should note that these are the top 5 most embedded videos. While there is a clear correlation between how often a video was embedded and how many views it got over the last few months, it's important to remember that this list isn't organized by total views over the last three months but by blog embeds and links.
5. United Break Guitars
Uploaded on July 6, 2009
5,914,000 views
4. MTV VMA's Remix: Kanye West Interrupts Obama's Speech
Yesterday we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we pick out our top 10 from your choices.
We've chosen the 10 in two batches. Firstly, the services that got the most number of mentions. As expected, these are well known apps that millions of people are using (or will use when it's launched, in the case of Google Wave). We didn't want this to be purely a popularity contest though, so we've also selected 5 lesser known web apps or services. Those apps all got multiple mentions and in our estimation they're each worthy of being labeled 'exciting.'
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Note: we offer the full list of apps voted for at the bottom of this post.
This was fairly predictable, with Twitter well out in front. There's been such excitement and activity around Twitter this year, that nobody could really argue against Twitter being the most exciting web or service around in 2009.
Twitter was followed by no less than 3 Google products, one of them as yet unreleased! (Google Wave). This shows that Google still has that aura of being 'exciting,' at least with ReadWriteWeb's early adopter readers.
Facebook slipped in at number 5, so it too seems to have kept up its reputation for being innovative.
Top 5 Lesser Known Apps
6. Spotify (RWW coverage): this Swedish online music app is about to launch in the U.S. and is highly anticipated by that market. It's so exciting that we've predicted it may even threaten Apple's near monopoly iTunes product. We'll have to wait and see what happens on that front, but Spotify certainly has a lot of people salivating! Other online music services mentioned multiple times in our poll were Blip.fm and last.fm.
7. Dropbox: this was listed as one of ReadWriteWeb's 5 Favorite Online Storage Services in September last year. At the time it had only just opened to the public, but it has since gained many fans. Its integration with the desktop is perhaps the most exciting feature of this product. Other features we like are the sharing of folders and preservation of every revision of every file.
8. Seesmic: A number of Twitter clients were mentioned, like Hootsuite and TweetDeck. But one which has impressed us a lot in recent months has been Seesmic. In July we reported that Seesmic, previously only a desktop client, had released a web-based version and a new version of the Seesmic desktop. The web-based version of Seesmic recreates most of the features that are currently available in the desktop application. Our own Frederic Lardinois listed Seesmic Web as one of his 3 most exciting apps.
9. Wolfram|Alpha: Ever since Wolfram|Alpha's admittedly much hyped launch in May, we've been tracking this innovative product closely. It's a self-described "computational knowledge engine" and while it's not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses - which makes it an exciting app to follow for us.
10. Pubsubhubbub: With a name harder to say that 'ReadWriteWeb,' this new Google Code project has excited the web development community. It's not a product, but a protocol. The project page describes it as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS)." In laymans terms, it delivers your RSS feeds to you much quicker - in near real time.
To understand the context of Pubsubhubbub and similar exciting initiatives more, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's fine analysis of Distributed Social Networking.
There you have it, the top 10 most exciting web apps and services according to the ReadWriteWeb community! Let us know your further thoughts in the comments.
Here is the full list, a snapshot taken when the original post had 66 comments (sans links, but Google - or Bing - any app that catches your eye).
Twitter 25
Gmail 17
Google Reader 11
Google Wave 11
Facebook 6
Blip.fm 4
Dropbox 4
Hootsuite 4
Wolfram Alpha 4
Pubsubhubbub 3
Scribd 3
Seesmic 3
Spotify 3
Wordpress 3
Apture 2
Boxee 2
Delicious 2
Flickr 2
foursquare 2
getsatisfaction 2
Google 2
last.fm 2
PixelPipe 2
Posterous 2
Skype 2
TweetDeck 2
Xmarks 2
Appboy
Bespin
Bit.ly
Bloom
Brightkite
Caspio
chi.mp
Cliqset
Deezer
Digg
Dizzler
Dopplr
Edmodo
Evernote
Feedly
FriendFeed
Gmail chat
GMX Mail
Google Analytics
Google Analytics API
Google APIs
Google Docs
Google insight
Google Maps
Google Notebook
Google Voice
Hype Machine
Instant XRay
Instapaper
iWantMyName
JaJah
JobTitled
Jolicloud
Jott
justbought.it
Know Thy Congressman
kreeo
Lala
Layar
LinkedIn
metafilter
mint
MobileMe
My Name is E
Nanovor
Newsmap.jp
Pachube
Parade
Peoplebrowsr
PocketSmith
Ponoko
PopUrls
Prezi
Primal Fusion
Salesforce
Shapeways
SocialText
SoundCloud
Sweetcron
Tarpipe
TimeXchange.net
Tracer
Tumblr
tweetworks
Twitterfall
urtak
W3C QA Toolbox
XCODE
Youtube
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.
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.
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. 
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.
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. 
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.
Wedding dances, dancing babies, Kanye West, broken guitars and a crowdsourced music video. These are the top 5 most embedded and linked to videos of this summer. Social media analytics and tracking firm 
Yesterday we asked 
7. 
9.