Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene , hindsight has proven to be much more interesting. WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009 gives us food for thought as we move into a new, hopefully less gaming-prone era of examining and measuring what real users are really talking about on the social web. Now, let's talk about Twilight and Michael Jackson. Or, in the choose-your-own-adventure model of blog posts, you can skip to the part where we talk about tech-related trending topics instead. Sponsor One of the most notable uses of any social network to date was the role of Twitter in the Iranian election/debacle/bloodbath. The U.S. State Department even made a call when Twitter was scheduled for maintenance downtime during the pursuant protests because the messaging service had proven so vital to the democratic process in that country. The worldwide buzz - and the sudden surge of green-tinted user icons and locations changed to "Tehran" - make #iranelection the number one Twitter trend of 2009. In an interesting convergence between mainstream Internet use and high-tech geekery that only Google could engineer, Wave appears in the number four spot for top Twitter trends. And we have a pretty good idea that Twitter users' out-and-out begging for an invite provided the bulk of that talk. As our loyal readers know, the ReadWriteWeb team is divided on whether Wave is a win or a fail so far, but there's no doubt that this tech launch was one of the hottest this year. In a stunning and welcome upset, #musicmonday pulled ahead of #followfriday, besting the well-known but spam-heavy hashtag by four places (Monday landed in the second position, Friday in the sixth). Is Follow Friday, a charming concept created with the most harmless intentions by our dear friend Micah Baldwin , simply a trend that has seen its day? Or is there something about taste-making and multimedia content curation that draws users to simply participate more? Also, there are the films. New Moon, the second in the Twilight franchise, earned a number five spot in the rankings. We are grateful that our sole experience of these tweets are a brilliant collection of snarks from professional lampooner, newly minted TV pretty boy and TheOnion.com web editor Baratunde Thurston. Also-rans are Paranormal Activity, a horror flick that turned a $15,000 budget into around $80 million in box office receipts, and the latest Harry Potter movie. Finally, as a longtime Trekkie, I am happy to report that the new Star Trek film beat out Bruno by around 20 places in these rankings. Both the Palm Pre and BlackBerry were mentioned in the top 100 trends, and one of our top ten international apps , Spotify, earned a number 63 spot on the list for consistent chatter and news throughout the year. Bing and Google Voice each earned a spot lower on the list, coming in at 81 and 100 respectively. Finally, to nod graciously in the direction of our good-natured rivals at Mashable , their Open Web Awards were the 27th most talked-about thing on Twitter this year. For a topic that didn't appear until mid-October (and for a topic generated by a tech blog, no less), this is a great measure of success for which Pete Cashmore and his team are to be congratulated. To get the full list, send an email to the folks at WhatTheTrend . Discuss

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Twitter Trends in 2009: A Retrospective

2009 may be remembered as the year that enterprises truly understand the importance of social software. This manifested with the rise of enterprise collaboration services, cloud computing technologies and the growing importance of mobile technologies for the enterprise. Web-based services are moving fast into the enterprise, raising questions about document-based environments in a world increasingly influenced by real-time information. We saw this time and again as the year rolled on. It played an important factor in how we developed our top ten list. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Our list includes three companies that made the list last year. We expect that this list may have some surprises. We welcome your feedback on the products that made the top 10 and your thoughts on ones that didn't make it. Microsoft Windows Azure and Sharepoint Microsoft has made huge strides with Sharepoint 2010. It is expected to continue its march into the enterprise this coming year. It may not be a best of breed application by any means, but its API is attracting a healthy number of third-party vendors. These companies are developing services to bring a level of transparency to enterprise data, which has historically been trapped in data silos. But Windows Azure is Microsoft's most exciting development. Ray Ozzie unveiled the cloud-based platform at the Professional Developers Conference last month and it is living up to its promise. It supports Ruby on Rails and MySQL, another sign that open-source is welcome on the Azure platform. Dallas, its mashup service, embraces the computational power of cloud computing, giving developers the ability to create their own applications that they may sell via the Azure platform. All in all, the services Microsoft is providing makes it a natural fit for the Top 10 list. Jive Software SBS 4.0 This Portland-based company continues to make strides into the enterprise. Earlier this Fall, the company unveiled Jive SBS 4.0 , its most significant update to date. SBS 4.0 is Jive's latest version of its enterprise collaboration technology. Jive may be the most threatening competitor to Microsoft Sharepoint. Its platform integrates with Microsoft Office, the iPhone and provides a social layer that users find compelling. Jive recently raised $12 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital. Salesforce.com Salesforce.com took a deep dive into the social space this year, culminating with Salesforce Chatter , a real-time service that acts as an internal social network for its customers. It was the culmination of a big year for the cloud-based service. Force.com, its application platform, saw significant growth. To date, developers have launched 135,000 applications on the platform. Further, a growing number of third-party services are integrating with the platform, showing again how important Salesforce.com has become in the Enterprise 2.0 space. SocialCast Social Business Intelligence One of our favorite companies in the web space, SocialCast is one of those services that just seems to understand the market and execute accordingly. What sets it apart is the user interface and SocialCast Social Business Intelligence , its sophisticated analytics environment, which will be a critical aspect to any service providing a real-time feed in an enterprise environment. Google Apps Google is making a clear move into the enterprise in a number of ways. Most recently, it enhanced its integration with the Blackberry. Google Sites recently had a major upgrade. Overall, Google is investing heavily in features to give enterprise customers more incentives to switch from Microsoft Office. We'll see how 2010 turns out for Google, but the path looks pretty clear for Google Apps to make further gains in the enterprise. Next page: Top Enterprise Products of 2009, 6-10 MindTouch MindTouch continues to find traction with its open-source services. Its most recent offering, MindTouch Cloud , is an open-source alternative to Sharepoint. Its ability to stitch together different data elements gives MindTouch an advantage in the enterprise, as customers seek additional ways to create dashboards that provide views into their internal systems and external environments. Cisco Collaboration This choice may be a bit of a surprise, but we feel that Cisco's investments in VOIP and collaboration services position it as a major player in the market. The company is acquiring Tandberg, it launched a social network service for internal use in the enterprise, and its VOIP service is now integrated with Salesforce.com. We see 2010 as the year that Cisco must tie it all together. It needs a glue to connect all of the services that it offers. Unlike Microsoft or IBM, Cisco lacks an underlying data structure. Still, the company's deep commitment to collaboration technologies in 2009 shows how it is transitioning to a new market that is built in many ways upon a social fabric. Socialtext The Socialtext story dates back to the days before Web 2.0. It began as a wiki provider and has since transformed itself into a collaboration service with real-time, microblogging integrations. In the past year, the company has continued to innovate - most recently with SocalCalc , the spreadsheet service that allows for multiple users to collaborate simultaneously across multiple documents. The challenge for Socialtext is to move past its perception as a wiki provider. The market is far larger for a collaboration platform and Socialext knows it. It will face steep competition in the enterprise against entrenched players like Microsoft and newcomers like Jive Software. present.ly Another company that may be flying under the radar to most, but is taking a smart approach with enterprise customers. Present.ly is an enterprise collaboration service that provides a real-time activity stream. It is profitable and growing, by taking the steps required to gain the trust of enterprises. Its security is tight and it offers the choice of an on-premise solution. present.ly is one of those elegant services that we admire for its smart fit with services like Twitter; and its compatibility with an array of mobile and web-based services. Apple iPhone Perhaps one of the mist revolutionary consumer products of our time, the iPhone is now also having a dramatic impact on the enterprise. Waves of business users have adopted the iPhone, creating demand for a new generation of enterprise applications. It's the Web that matters. Apple understands that dynamic far more than RIM and its Blackberry, which has a tough fight on its hands in 2010. There is no slowing down the iPhone - it's quickly becoming the app of choice for the enterprise. In Conclusion In 2009 we saw the rise of collaboration services, the maturing of cloud computing and advances in SaaS platforms. The rise of mobile technologies will continue in 2010. And social technologies in the enterprise? Well, they're here to stay. ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Discuss

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Top 10 Enterprise Products of 2009

Research firm Gartner has just put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth. Sponsor For many of the categories on this list, there are a number of mobile apps that are already available today. But what Gartner makes clear is that we're just getting started when it comes to their use. For example, location-based services (LBS) - there still isn't one single app which everyone uses to find each their friends out in the real world via their mobile phones. Instead, we have a number of similar but competing applications all vying to be the Facebook of location-based apps. Another example is money payments - this type of service is having more of an impact in the developing world right now where access to banks is more difficult than here in the Western world where people just want the convenience of paying through their mobiles. When was the last time you paid someone or paid at checkout through your mobile phone? Never? That sounds about right. The List The full list is as follows: Money Transfer: This refers to people sending money via SMS messages. Like mobile payments, this service has more appeal in developing markets for now. However, there may come a time when even using your debit card seems passé, while paying for something with actual cash seems downright ancient. Location-Based Services: As mentioned above, there are still far too many services to choose from when it comes to location-based social networking, fragmenting the market. Your friends on Loopt are often different than those on Brightkite and that list is different than those on Foursquare . But LBS extends to more than social networks - it includes any application that taps into your phone's GPS capabilities to offer up location-based services of any kind, whether that's local business reviews or directions to the nearest Starbucks. Gartner says this will be one of the most disruptive technologies in the future, with a user base growing from 96 million in 2009 to 526 million in 2012. Mobile Search: No, mobile search isn't new, but on the mobile platform, it may get shaken up a bit. Gartner predicts that consumers won't necessarily be sticking with the search services they know and use on the Web (think Google, Bing, Yahoo) and instead experiment with using a few different search providers that have "unique technologies" for mobile search. While that statement is a little vague, it sounds like good news for services like Taptu who have entered this field with search offerings designed from the ground-up for mobile devices. Mobile Browsing: Saying that mobile browsing technologies will be heavily used in the future sounds a little bit like stating the obvious. But as Gartner notes, mobile browsing capabilities currently exist only on 60%+ of handsets today. By 2013, that number will climb to 80%, meaning that those who are still using the app-less,more basic feature phones will still be joining the mobile web in mass numbers over the coming years. That's also good news for web developers who can build mobile web applications to cater to this bunch as opposed to focusing all their efforts into building apps for the numerous mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, RIM, and others. Mobile Health Monitoring: Another technology whose impact will be felt more heavily in developing markets, mobile health monitoring is still at an early stage of maturity and implementation says Gartner. Project rollouts have been limited to pilot projects for now, but in the coming years the industry will begin to monetize these efforts by offering mobile healthcare monitoring products, services, and solutions to various care delivery organizations. Mobile Payments: Like mobile transfers, mobile payments are more common in developing markets at the moment, but that is quickly changing. Yet even as this type of service grows, Gartner admits there will be challenges. Mobile payments will be a "highly fragmented market" where there will not be "standard practices of deployment," notes the report. That makes it sound like this is one technology that will still need some work, even when 2012 rolls around. Near Field Communications (NFC): More popular in some European and Asian markets than in the U.S., NFC still isn't a standard feature on many of today's phones. That may be about to change, too. In late 2010, Gartner says that NFC-enabled phones will begin to ship in volume, with Asia leading deployments, followed by Europe and North America. Mobile Advertising: Also not new but growing fast, mobile advertising is one of the most important ways to monetize mobile content. Total spending on mobile advertising in 2008 was $530.2 million and it will grow to $7.5 billion in 2012. And mobile advertising will also be used by companies alongside their other campaigns including TV, radio, print, and outdoors. Mobile Instant Messaging: Gartner says that latent user demand and market conditions are conductive to mobile IM's future adoption. It will appeal to developing markets where mobile phones are often the only connectivity device a user owns. But will it be a major app by 2012? It seems that SMS is still the service to beat, especially in the developing world. We'll have to wait and see on this one. Mobile Music: Sure, you have the iPhone, but what about your other options? What about mobile music services - especially those for non-iPhone devices? We're still waiting on Spotify in the U.S., for example, and their competition too. Gartner says that we're beginning to see new innovative models in this area that will include both device (think "Comes with Music") and service bundles. What's Missing? A glaring omission from this report is that of Augmented Reality. Gartner had even placed this technology on their " Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2009 " report earlier this year . Do they not think that AR will have a major impact by 2012? Considering that's only a little over a year away, it could just be too soon for AR to see the widespread adoption that we hoped it would have by then. Or it's possible that - as some have suspected - AR is simply a "cool" way to see and interact with the world around you, but hasn't produced any "must-have," highly useful applications just yet. For example, seeing AR views of local businesses and user recommendations is fun, but is it a markedly better experience than using a service like Yelp ? For many, that answer today is "no." AR needs to grow out of being an technology you use "because you can" to one you use "because you have to." Until it's the best option to perform a particular task, it may not make Gartner's next list, either.