This week we ran a reader poll , asking for your votes on the top Web products of the year. Thousands of you voted for up to 10 products, from a list of 100 selected by the ReadWriteWeb authors over December. The poll has now closed and we're pleased to present the ReadWriteWeb community's Top 10 Web Products of 2009 . Here is the final top 10: Sponsor 1. Twitter 2. Google Chrome 3. Google Maps 4. Facebook 5. WordPress 6. iPhone platform 7. Google Apps 8. Adobe AIR 9. Hulu 10. TweetDeck So there you have it, Twitter was the best product of 2009 according to ReadWriteWeb readers! Relatedly, Twitter desktop client TweetDeck made the list at #10. Google had 3 products in the top 3: Chrome (#2), Maps (#3) and Google Apps (#7). This more than justifies their selection by our editors as Best BigCo of 2009 . Honorable Mentions, #11-25 The following products missed out on the final top 10, but they were all popular picks among our community. Many of them are startup products, so they can be proud to say they're among the top 25 products of 2009 according to our readers. In alphabetical order: Android platform Bing DropBox (note: DropBox was missing from the original top 100, but we're including in the top 25 due to the number of comment-votes it received on the original post) Evernote Facebook iPhone app Feedly Google Voice Open Calais Posterous Mint Spotify Tumblr Tweetie Wolfram Alpha Woopra That's it, the culmination of our Best Products 2009 series . Hope you all enjoyed it and we look forward to another year of innovation in web technology in 2010! Discuss

Here is the original post:
Poll Results: ReadWriteWeb Readers Pick The Top 10 Products of 2009

You'd think it was odd if you called me for directions and I told you to go 0.2 miles southeast and make a slight right onto Old Route 17. You'd expect me to say something more like, "Start driving away from the library and take the second right just after the McDonald's." Google Maps India has just launched a hybridized version of directions that give geographically accurate distances and directions as well as landmarks most humans would also recognize. We can imagine this coming to the rural U.S. and Google telling us to "follow that-there little jog in the road where the big oak tree used to be before Jimmy Ray hit it with his daddy's combine, bless his heart, for 2.3 miles." Sponsor Although most urban Americans are comfortable navigating by street signs, in other parts of our country and the rest of the world, landmarks are a necessity in successfully reaching one's destination. Other times, it's simply reassuring to know that you haven't actually missed a turn or your destination because you haven't yet passed a given landmark. How many times has someone told you on the phone to "keep going straight until you pass the shopping center" or something of that sort, and it saved you a missed turn as well as a general sense of anxiety? In the words of UX Googler Olga Khroustaleva , "We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names... Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out." The point of the whole experiment was to give drivers a sense of confidence when exploring new territory. Ultimately, the Google team found that a combination of street names and distances as well as landmarks gave the best results and best satisfied users. Sree Unnikrishnan and Manik Gupta wrote on the Google India blog, "This effort was possible thanks to the large amount of landmark data that users like you contributed through Google Map Maker. Our new algorithm determines from available signals, which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on importance and closeness to the turns that you're making." Here's a look at the Google Maps directions design we all know: And here's a version Google Maps India tried that added landmarks to other data to confirm directions: Finally, here's what Indian travellers will see moving forward: Looks pretty sweet to us! What do you folks think? Would you like to see more Map Maker landmark data for driving directions all over the world, too? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

Read the original:
Turn Right at the Gas Station: Google Maps Gets More Human

Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we've opened up our selections for you to vote on . The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. We will announce the final top 10, along with the full results, this Friday . After one day of voting, here is the top 10: Sponsor 1 Twitter 2 Google Maps 3 Google Chrome 4 Facebook 5 Hulu 6 Adobe AIR 7 WordPress 8 TweetDeck 9 iPhone platform 10 Evernote Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

See the article here:
Interim Results: Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Last week we surveyed you , the ReadWriteWeb community, about your favorite mobile applications. We asked for your top 5 mobile apps and ended up with nearly 200 different mobile apps in the post and comments! Today we reveal the full results, including the most popular mobile apps of our tech savvy readers. Earlier today our resident Mobile Web expert Sarah Perez listed ReadWriteWeb's top 10 Mobile Web products of 2009 . As for your choices, 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). The top 16 is listed below, with commentary. Also at the bottom of the post you'll find a spreadsheet of the entire list. Sponsor Top Mobile Apps of RWW Readers Facebook 32 Tweetie 24 Google Maps 14 Foursquare 10 Evernote 8 Shazam 8 Google Mobile 7 Echofon (Twitter client for Mac) 6 Gmail Mobile 6 Pandora 6 TweetDeck 6 Twitterrific 6 Dropbox (to sync files) 5 Kindle 5 Spotify 5 Yelp 5 Many of our readers use iPhones, so the above list features more iPhone apps than apps from Android, Blackberry, Nokia, or other phones. Facebook was the most popular mobile app listed by you all. Facebook has been improving their iPhone app all year and this survey shows that our readers are liking those iterations. As Sarah Perez noted earlier today , "if any application deserves an "app of the year" award, it's Facebook 3.0 for iPhone." Not far behind Facebook was Tweetie, a popular mobile Twitter client which released a major new version of their app in September. Tweetie 2 introduced features like video tweets, offline mode, geolocation, and more. Other mobile Twitter apps to be mentioned multiple times include Echofon, TweetDeck and Twitterific. Google has always been popular in our Mobile apps surveys, since we began doing them in 2007 . They're listed 3 times in the above list, including at number 3 with Google Maps. Several mobile-centric apps (i.e. apps developed specifically for mobile, rather than the desktop computer) made our top 16 list. Foursquare is a trendy new mobile social network, Evernote is a great note-taking tool, Shazam is a head-scratchingly good app for identifying songs - to name just a few. Click here to see a Google spreadsheet featuring the entire list of nearly 200 mobile apps listed by our readers. SEE ALSO: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Discuss

More:
Your Favorite Mobile Apps: Facebook, Tweetie, Google Maps, Foursquare, and More

Originally set to launch in "early December," Twidroid surprised us by launching the next version of the popular Android Twitter client here on the last day of November instead. Twidroid 3.0, which is now available in the Android Marketplace, is a major update for this mobile application, introducing new features like geolocation, in-app image previews, threaded conversations, and, most notably an extensible plugin platform . Sponsor According to the release notes , the updated Twidroid app includes the following new features: Threaded conversations In-app image previews for twitpic, yfrog, twitgoo, phodroid, posterous and twitter profile images In-app link previews Twidroid plugins 1.0 + example on our website Action menu design streamlined with icons Share option for single tweet View large avatar in profile Saved searches sync with twitter Marker for tweets annotated with geo information Report spam Remember timeline position setting (default: on) Jump to top in timeline button Autocomplete usernames for timeline and replies Bring up tweet box directly by typing @ DM list now with avatars Friends/Followers now available in free version and moved to profile view The update also includes a fix for HTC Hero image upload problems, which users of that handheld will undoubtedly appreciate. As you can see from the list above, the new Twidroid is now a worthy competitor to its iPhone rivals, especially Tweetie 2.0, which also introduced similar features like threaded conversation and geolocation only months ago. In fact, Twidroid may have just one-upped its competitors as it is now one of the first mobile applications to introduce a plugin platform. Twidroid Does Plugins Twitter client plugins are just now started to be heavily discussed, thanks to a post by web guru Dave Winer which argued for the need of a programmable Twitter client. Loic Le Meur, maker of the Seesmic application, then followed up by expanding upon his vision for Seesmic's development platform. Having just announced his move from Adobe AIR to Windows for the continued development of the PC-based Seesmic Desktop application, Le Meur writes that the app is now ready to become a programmable client. When launched, the desktop version of Seesmic will allow third-party developers to build features or services that can be integrated into Seesmic's core application. Similarly, Twidroid's plugin platform offers the same type of promise, albeit on the mobile platform. Thanks to this new functionality, third-party developers can extend Twidroid with features like URL shortener integrations or additional sharing features, notes the website . To kick off the launch, the company has introduced a sample plugin for Google Maps integration which shows a Twitterer's current location on a map and allows them to update or annotate that location as well. Adding a plugin architecture is a major achievement among Twitter client applications - and certainly among the mobile set - as it will allow the apps to become highly customizable and personalized creations unique to each and every user's needs. The only problem with plugins is that those you add in one client may not be available in another. That is, plugins added to the upcoming version of Seesmic won't necessarily be available in Twidroid and vice versa. This points to a need for Twitter itself to become the extensible platform and not each individual app. However, in the meantime, regular users of Twidroid will certainly enjoy this added functionality as they begin to customize the app to their liking. Discuss

Excerpt from:
Twidroid 3.0 Launches with Plugin Support

In a recent post on Twitter's new geolocation feature and the kinds of apps it would allow developers to create, we received a comment from Bob Hitching telling us to check out GeoMeme . GeoMeme is Hitching's side project , a real-time web app and also a location-aware mobile web app for iPhone and Android phones. It allows users to see and compare trends in specific locations; for example, you could see the most tweeted-about musicians performing at an award show or the most-tweeted political buzzwords in a given state or town. Sponsor Here's how it works: Users choose a location on the map (powered by Google Maps), and they select from the list of current trending Twitter topics or type in two search terms to compare. GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the stated geographical area based on public data from a number of geotagged tweets from mobile Twitter apps. For example, on this Sunday evening, we can see that the Vikings are beating the Bears... in Twitter mentions in Minneapolis, at least: The app might also be interesting for brands. We can see here that legendary local burger chain In N Out wins over Carl's Jr. in Twitter mentions in Los Angeles: We can also use the app to check the pulse of holiday revelers in New York City: It would be even cooler to see a sentiment-measuring feature; i.e., I'd like to compare tweets of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in Virginia, then see what percent of those tweets were negative or favorable. Not all mentions of a given term are going to be good ones, after all. Take GeoMeme for a test drive in your town to see what your neighbors are tweeting about, and let us know your thoughts in the comments! Do you think that with more development, GeoMeme could be a useful tool? Discuss

See the rest here:
See Twitter Trends Around Your Neighborhood with GeoMeme

Google just announced the launch of its Google Maps Navigation app for Android 1.6 and higher. Until now, Google's turn-by-turn navigation app was only available on Android 2.0 phones like Motorola's Droid . Now users of older Android handsets like the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and G1 can get free turn-by-turn navigation courtesy of Google. The Android 1.6 version of Google Maps Navigation doesn't offer some features of the 2.0 version, including advanced voice commands. Otherwise, the two apps seem to be identical. Sponsor Starting today, Android 1.6 users can download the app from the Android Market. The service is currently only available in the US, though some users managed to hack their phones to make the app work anywhere in the world. We called Google Maps Navigation a killer feature for Android 2.0 when Google announced it's release last month. Currently, however, there are only a few Android 2.0 phones on the market, so it only makes sense for Google to release this app for older phones as well. Just like the Android 2.0 version, Google Maps Navigation for Android 1.6 will include voice guidance, traffic data, satellite and Street View imagery. The app will also show geographical information courtesy of the Google Maps Layers feature the company introduced earlier this year. Discuss

Read this article:
Google Brings Its Turn-By-Turn Navigation App to Older Android Phones