Ever since finding myself the happy owner of a Droid (+1 for early Christmas presents), I've found myself increasingly interested in the app market for Android-powered devices. As has been noted in many iPhone/Droid sudden-death-round comparisons, the latter languishes in quality and quantity of available applications. Perhaps in an effort to increase Droid's competitiveness in the market, the powers that be have created a new section of resources for Android developers . Let the games (and other apps) begin! Sponsor In the new Resources tab of the online Android SDK documentation , devs can now access technical articles, some pretty detailed tutorials, a breakdown of platform versions, common tasks, troubleshooting tips, a community across groups/IRC/Twitter channels and a library of code for sample apps - just what a mobile/smartphone dev would need to get started. The list of sample code now includes: API Demos Bluetooth Chat Contact Manager Home JetBoy Lunar Lander Multiple Resolutions Note Pad Searchable Dictionary Snake Soft Keyboard Wiktionary Wiktionary (Simplified) The Android dev team has also taken their most popular developer blog posts and turned them into a series of technical articles ranging in scope from backward compatibility issues and future-proofing apps to layout tricks and text-to-speech uses. Currently, around 10,000 applications exist in the Android Market as compared to the (roughly) eleventy bajillion apps in the Apple App Store. Hopefully, these resources will help this open-source mobile development platform take off, allowing Android's available applications to become a selling point for Android-powered devices rather than a point ceded to Apple in the smartphone wars. Discuss

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Android Developers: Here's Some Sample Code & Tutorials

TechSmith , the makers of powerful screencast recording software Camtasia and screen capture app SnagIt, announced this morning that a beta version of SnagIt is now available for the Mac . The Windows version costs $50 but the Mac beta is free for now. It's great. If you've used Skitch or Little Snapper , SnagIt seems much more full-featured. The best parts I've seen so far are far more font options and really easy composite image creation. Sponsor The company's demo video is below. This is just beta software and hopefully it will be more stable and less clunky than early versions of TechSmith's free cross-platform video and image product Jing Project. The recently released Camtasia for Mac was very well done and appears quite stable. One thing that's missing is the ability to quickly post an image to Flickr or any other online site. That would be nice and is a feature that competitors offer. Easy click and drag resize is something that SnagIt could pick up from other services as well. All in all, though, this looks like a very nice product. Discuss

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SnagIt Goes Mac: Check Out The Best Screen Capture App Available

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

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Interim Results: Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009 , in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we're opening up our selections for you to vote on. We've embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected . We invite you to vote for your favorite web products of 2009. You can select 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. Sponsor We will announce the top 10, along with the full results, at the end of this week. 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

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Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series , below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009. You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year. Sponsor This is the fifth in our series on top products of 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Top 10 International Web Products of 2009 Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users . A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That's a powerful cultural change. Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data - thanks to Twitter. Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it's overwhelming but the end result is an experience that brings the dispersed social web back together again. Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It's got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria - we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking. PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud ) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties - immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on. Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It's a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web. Tweetdeck (and Seesmic ) are the market's leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit , but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It's in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web. Honorable Mentions: Feedly Twingly Twitterfeed Public Radio Tuner Regator Collected.info Postrank just keeps getting smarter. This social media analytics service tracks distributed conversation regarding blogs and feeds and scores items based on the relative engagement of those conversations. The usefulness of this service just doesn't stop and the company's movement into large-publisher analytics and APIs this year should bode well for customers, developers and consumers. Postrank is the only service on this list that was also on 2008's list. ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn't be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week's announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset . The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that's changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that's so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO's research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have. Discuss

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Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

As we reported Thanksgiving Day , web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise. However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion's share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy - and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping. Sponsor Interestingly, Apple's website saw the largest increase - by a huge margin - between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Overnight, their traffic skyrocketed 110 percent. Traditionally, Apple's online deals for this red-letter day in commerce were modest at best. However, this year, rumors of substantial discounts were leaked online and spread like wildfire. The lesson: If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then "leak" good tidings of great joy just before the big day. Other sites that saw a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples (47 percent), Dell (40 percent) and Amazon (9 percent). So, Apple, Staples and Dell take the cake for getting the greatest traffic spikes overnight; how did websites fare on Black Friday overall? As you can see in the graph below, Amazon and Walmart each performed admirably. What's more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year's Black Friday traffic - as you'll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers? Finally, who got the most downstream traffic from Black Friday websites? That would be our friends at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target - the latter of which more than doubled its downstream traffic from last year: Details for Cyber Monday - traditionally the online retailer's biggest day during the holiday season - will be available shortly. Discuss

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Amazon Wins for Most Visited Site on Black Friday

Happy Tweetsgiving ! At any number of companies, people are being asked to do their part. To give something back to their community. Epic Change is taking a different approach. Through tomorrow, the Tweetsgiving campaign asks people to share whatever they are thankful for on Twitter , your blog , flickr , Facebook , YouTube or blip.fm Sponsor The group is asking for your hard earned capital, of course, through PayPal, but social capital is a big part of the campaign, too, by completing tweets with #tweetsgiving and provide a link back to http://tweetsgiving.org . In its second year, the group has the stated purpose to encourage people to show gratitude for what they have. In addition to the online campaign, Epic Change is encouraging people to attend a Tweetsgiving party . Donations will help build an additional classroom, orphanage/boarding facility, cafeteria and library at Epic Change's partner school in Tanzania. In 2010, Epic Change will continue to look for social entrepreneurs like Mama Lucy, an Epic Fellow. The United Way may be one way to give to your community through your business but Twitter and the social web open a whole new world for ways to give. So, Happy Tweetsgving everyone. We are grateful for your continued interest in the posts we write here at ReadWrite Enterprise . Discuss

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Tweetsgiving: The Twitter Way To Give Thanks