This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we’ve explored these trends: Structured Data , The Real-Time Web , Personalization . The fourth part of our series is on Mobile Web . We’re including Augmented Reality in this category, as we think it’s a key element of where the Mobile Web is heading circa 2009. In April we reported statistics from browser company Opera showing large growth on the Mobile Web. According to Opera, there was a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. What’s driving that growth is devices like the iPhone, new mobile operating systems like Android, and hot applications like Augmented Reality. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Apple Dominates Mobile Web, But Android on The Rise… We named Apple our Best Bigco of 2008 , mostly due to the success of the iPhone and accompanying App Store. By most statistics, Apple is in a fairly dominant position in the Mobile Web. At the beginning of the year we reported data from AdMob (a leading mobile advertising marketplace) showing that Apple has a 48% market share of smartphone traffic in the United States. That figure doesn’t just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch too. By June 2009, Apple’s share of smartphone traffic in the U.S. had surged to 64% . Perhaps more significantly though, Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone traffic had increased to 47%. This is important, because internationally other smartphones were utilized much more than in the U.S. before the iPhone arrived. However, Apple can’t afford to rest on its laurals. Google’s mobile OS Android has been making rapid progress. According to the latest Admob statistics available, for July ’09 , requests from the Android Operating System increased 53% month over month and Android now has 7% worldwide OS share. The iPhone OS dropped slightly to 45% worldwide and 60% in the U.S. Bigco Initiatives & Trendy Startups All of the big Internet companies have strong Mobile Web initiatives. We discussed Apple and Google above. Yahoo continues to push Mobile Web , which currently goes under the OneConnect brand. Microsoft has announced a number of mobile initiatives this year, including a mobile version of Microsoft Office and MySpace bringing its platform to Windows Mobile phones. Earlier this month Facebook announced a mobile expansion of their Facebook Connect platform . “Facebook Connect for Mobile Web” enables developers to add a Facebook Connect button to their apps in order to make them more social. Probably of most interest is watching the up and coming Mobile Web startups. We’ve had our eye on Brightkite for some time, but perhaps the trendiest startup right now is Foursquare . It’s a location-aware social app for the iPhone, but only available in a limited number of countries currently. Augmented Reality Augmented reality, the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device, has been a very hot trend this year. As we noted in August , it is in everything from mobile apps to kids toys. Many people think that “AR” will soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about “social media” and “Web 2.0″ before that. That remains to be seen, but there’s no denying there is a lot of interest in AR right now. As we reported at the end of August, the AR apps are starting to flow into Android (the early leader in this space) and iPhone devices. We reported that the Paris Metro Subway was apparently the first AR-enabled app to be accepted into iTunes. Then came a new Yelp app with AR , which any 3Gs owner can turn on by shaking their phone. Presselite , the company that made the Paris Metro Subway app, followed up with a London Bus app for the App Store. Conclusion Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. Many of our readers have smartphones nowadays, a good proportion of them being iPhones or Android devices (our statistics prove this). And there is no shortage of mobile web applications flowing into the App Store and Android’s marketplace – not to forget Nokia and other prominent mobile manufacturers. What’s perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we’re seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It’s been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come. ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Mobile Web & Augmented Reality

As part of the European Union’s antitrust agreement with Microsoft , the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser. Love or hate the government intervention, it’s notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe. Sponsor On the Front Page – The Best Known 5 The first page of the Choice Screen, which users will be presented with when they first turn on their computers or when they click a link for it later, will feature whichever five browsers have the largest market share over the previous 6 months. Microsoft will begin showing the page to users in March, 2010. Right now the top 5 will include, in the order listed on an EU page about the program: Apple Safari – that’s right, even for Windows! Google Chrome – so soon. If Chrome can grow so fast, it makes you wonder if government intervention is really needed. Of course, Chrome has been promoted prominently on Google pages. That could become part of the next antitrust issue. Microsoft Internet Explorer – gets better all the time, even with dominant market share. Couldn’t the EU just require people to stop using IE 6? Mozilla Firefox – the classic that’s most effectively challenged IE. In fact, it’s done so pretty effectively. Too bad Chrome now runs circles around its performance. Opera – loved by mobile users, loved by Europeans. Below the Fold – The Smaller Challengers Users will be able to scroll the Choice Screen horizontally and see the next 7 most popular browsers at the time. Here’s who the EU lists as those browsers today. AOL – chuckle if you will, but AOL is doing a lot of innovative work with social networks and lifestreaming these days. Maxthon – is a popular browser in China and has its sights set on topping Opera in Europe. K-Meleon – says its a super-fast Windows browser built on Gecko, the same layout engine Firefox uses. Flock – is a Mozilla-powered browser that integrates a whole lot of social features. It’s got such a great feature set that we recently asked Why don’t you love Flock? Avant Browser – says that it, in fact, is the browser that’s the fastest. It includes an inline RSS reader and a number of other interesting features. Sleipnir – is a highly-customizable browser that says it’s big in Japan. Slim Browser – a Windows browser focused on automating processes. That’s the field, so far! Do you think this move will foster increased innovation? Do you think it’s needed? Discuss

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Meet the 12 Lucky Browsers European IE Users Will Be Shown Next Year

What exactly from Office Web Apps and Office Mobile 2010 can you use on your mobile right now and what will be available when the product ships next spring? Mary Jo Foley does the best job of outlining what is happening here. Let’s take a sky high look and see if we can make sense of things so you know what to do if you really have an interest in giving Office a try on the mobile. Sponsor First of all, Office Web Apps is now in beta and available for download. It is free. Here is the first point of confusion and in our book goes to the heart of the issue. The Office Web Apps you download today is NOT the Office Web Apps that will ship next spring. What you download today is actually the business version, which is the paid version of the product. We expect that if you download the application today then you will have to download a new one when the REAL Office Web Apps launches next spring. Let’s move on to the next issue. What is exactly available with Office Web Apps ? According to Foley, it works with the following phones and apps: * IE on Windows Mobile 5/6/6.1/6.5 * Safari4 on iPhone 3G/S * BlackBerry 4.x and newer versions * Nokia S60 * NetFront 3.4, 3.5 and newer versions * Opera Mobile 8.65 and newer versions * Openwave 6.2, 7.0 and newer versions Hold on one more time. There is more we need to explain. According to Foley, you can only view documents in Office Web Apps. You can not write to

A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps . It’s become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we’re collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below. We first ran this poll in November 2007 , before Apple’s App Store opened on July 10, 2008 and when Android was but a twinkle in Google’s eye. At that time, the 5 most mentioned mobile apps were the Gmail Java app, Google Maps, Opera Mini, Fring and Shozu. In November 2008 we began to see popular web services being mentioned as favorite mobile apps too: Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, FriendFeed. Also newer mobile-focused apps like Evernote and Brightkite. Read on for the 2009 edition of this reader survey… Sponsor Note: ReadWriteWeb’s iPhone app is coming soon! To be notified as soon as it becomes available, email notify@readwriteweb.com . Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor (iPhone user): Diamedic; diabetes data input and monitoring tool that I use multiple times a day. Encamp; new Basecamp project management app that the RWW team has just begun using. Shazam; amazing song discovery app that I use regularly, e.g. holding up my iPhone to the car radio to identify cool songs! Evernote; notes service which I was late adopter of, but it’s since become essential. Tweetie 2; my current Twitter app of choice on the iPhone. Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger and VP Content Development (iPhone and Android): Aardvark Tweetdeck SuperSearch Regator Appsfire Sarah Perez, feature writer and RWW’s resident Mobile Web expert (“Only 5?” she replied to my Basecamp message…Sarah uses iPhone): Facebook Tweetie 2 Yelp NYT Mobile Bump (app for swapping contact details) Frederic Lardinois, writer (iPhone): Tweetie2 Beejive, for IM Notifications picposterous Pandora Jolie O’Dell, writer and RWW Community Manager (Blackberry): TwitterBerry Flickr Jolie notes (and you can sense the frustration!): “The BlackBerry user of the group has few options and fewer favorites. In fact, I’d almost post a response rant about how the development for BlackBerry devices AND the OS make enjoyable user experiences a near-impossibility.” Dana Oshiro, writer (iPhone): Foursquare Tweetie Breaking News Online Aardvark Yelp, or OpenTable Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise editor (Blackberry, who notes that “the experience is just awful.”): Yelp Slandr Facebook Gmail Google mobile Jared Smith, RWW webmaster (Blackberry and iPod touch): RadarScope; weather radar viewer for iPhone and iPod touch. TouchTerm; on-the-go SSH for iPhone and iPod touch. MyKite; BlackBerry Brightkite app. Yatca; BlackBerry microblogging client that supports Twitter and identi.ca with seamless inbox integration. Google Sync for BlackBerry; “while not true push, it works so quietly and seamlessly I don’t give it a second thought.” Now, RWW readers, it’s time for your feedback! Let us know in the comments below what your favorite mobile apps are and what mobile device(s) you use. Please limit this to 5 apps , so we can identify trends more easily and report back on them in an upcoming post. Discuss

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Your Favorite Mobile Apps of 2009 (Reader Survey)

Opera just announced the release of Opera 10.10 . This latest version of Opera’s desktop browser now includes Opera Unite , the company’s browser-based web server. With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars – but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user’s computer. When Opera first talked about Unite, it claimed that this service would “reinvent the web.” This resulted in a lot of hype before the announcement and the inevitable backlash right afterward. When we tested the first alpha version of Opera with the built-in Unite feature, however, we came away quite impressed . Sponsor As usual, this latest version of Opera is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. Your Browser is Now Also a Server Opera Unite allows you to easily turn your desktop into a web server and run a number of web services like photo-sharing, file-sharing, a web server, and an online media player right from your machine and access all of these services from anywhere. While this gives you control over your media, it also means that your data is only available online as long as your computer is running. Starting a Unite server takes seconds (though you need an Opera account to make this work). Opera will assign an address to your computer based on your username. Users can choose if they want to protect their applications with passwords or if they want to make them available to anybody on the net. Nothing New Besides Unite Besides Opera Unite, this latest version doesn’t sport any major new features. With features like Opera Turbo, bookmark syncing, and the sleek new visual tabs design that Opera introduced in the last update, Opera 10 does have a lot of things going for it. In our tests this morning, the browser was stable and fast. Even though we didn’t run any benchmarks, Opera 10 felt just as fast as any other modern browser. For more information about Opera Unite, also have a look at our more in-depth review of the service and the apps that Opera includes by default. Discuss

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Your Browser is Now a Web Server: Opera Includes Opera Unite in Opera 10.10

It only took 3 years to go from HTML2 to HTML4, but the HTML4.01 specifications were published 10 years ago and even though today’s web looks very different, we are still waiting for HTML5. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group started preliminary work on what is now known as HTML5 in 2004 and the W3C HTML Working Group was adopted this draft as the basis for the HTML5 specs in 2007. Some modern browsers already offer partial support for HTML5, but there are still quite a few issues that need to be resolved before we will see the finalized version of the HTML5 specifications. One area where there is still a lot of discussion is support for video in HTML5. Sponsor What Codec? Philippe Le Hegaret, the interaction domain leader for the W3C, talked about this issue in an interview with WebMonkey’s Michael Calore . According to Le Hegaret, video support is still one of the main issues surrounding the development of HTML5. Safari and Chrome are both based on the same open-source WebKit engine. Video support, however, is not part of WebKit yet, so every vendor implements it differently. Currently, browser developer disagree over how to implement this feature and what codec to use. Apple wants to use uses H.264 and Mozilla, Google and Opera support Ogg Theora. As of now, HTML5 still includes the tag, but doesn’t specify which codec to use. Transition from Plugins Until these issues are sorted out, users will have to continue to rely on plugins. Of course, the only way to do away with video plugins would be to make sure that every online video provider also adopted this new standard. As Le Hegaret rightly points out in the interview with WebMonkey, people don’t like to install plugins, but everybody installs the Flash plugin because “if you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.” Le Hegaret acknowledges that there has to be a transition period before users can switch from Flash to HTML5 video. For developers, the fact that the video is not running in a plugin that can’t talk to the browser is a major advantage of having built-in video support in the browser. With video in HTML5, developers can connect the video to the rest of the page and have actions on the page or video influence other parts of the site. What About Microsoft? At today’s PDC keynote, Microsoft noted that it has to improve support for HTML5 in its browser. While the company didn’t say a lot about Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft