With 3 days to go before the New Year dawns on us, the web is crazy with their reviews for 2009. We have brought to you some reviews by experts in the field. Latest of them being the Top 10 Tracks on Spotify. Today it’s time to discuss the iPhone apps and the 10 hottest among them according to iPhone Apps review site AppVee. It is a mammoth task analyzing, tracking and reviewing 100,000 apps in the Apple Apps store. Let’s give some credit to the AppVee reviewers for the commendable job. Without further ado we give 2009’s top 10 iPhone Apps.

Facebook 3.0

Fandango

Beejive 3.0

LogMeIn

MobileNavigator

Dropbox

Textfree Unlimited, TweetDeck, Craigsphone, Ustream

Spotify just announced the top 10 most popular tracks for the year 2009 on their music streaming service. Black Eyed Peas top the list followed by Flo Rida and Akon–David.  Spotify is popular in European countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. This list is hence the reflection of the European choice of music.

The list is a statistical measure of the no of time each track has been streamed on spotify. Here is the top 10 list.

1.	I Gotta Feeling by Black Eyed Peas
2.	Right Round – Amended Album Version by Flo Rida
3.	Sexy Bitch (Featuring Akon;explicit) by Akon, David Guetta
4.	Poker Face by Lady Gaga
5.	Halo by Beyoncé
6.	Use Somebody by Kings Of Leon
7.	Boom Boom Pow by Black Eyed Peas
8.	Ayo Technology by Milow
9.	When Love Takes Over (Feat.Kelly Rowland) by Kelly Rowland, David Guetta
10.	Kids by MGMT

Spotify has compiled a playlist of the top 100 songs of the year so that you can have them all in one place. See the complete list on spotify.

There have been many social networking creation sites around. I have personally tired ning.com, socialgo etc. Today I stumbled upon grou.ps. I liked its service and I am  sharing it with you.

It was impressive from the beginning. The sign up process is one of the simplest I have seen. In a few simple steps you can get your own social network up and running in 15 mins. Your members can sign in using the Facebook connect feature, that is one of the most popular global identity platforms around. With the Facebook connect integrated your new users are prompted to invite more friends from their network to your own grou.ps network. So traffic and members can go viral with ease. There are other invite option like direct mailing and address book import too.

Look and Feel

• You have a host of themes and color schemes to choose form.
• But what sets this service apart is the fully customizable modules and ability to moderate different features.
• You have normal commenting and liking options as in Facebook. You can add multiple blogs and rss feeds. Even if you don’t have your blog you can create blog post right here.
• You can add photos, videos and discussions to the live stream.
• Finally I would like to mention the Wiki feature. You and your network can have jointly edited content like those on Wikipedia.

Custom domains

Not many would like urls like http://grou.ps/ursocialnetwork. If you have something like http://mysocialnetwork.mydomain.com on your mind then just change the CNAME records on your DNS provider.

Removing Ads, Monetization and Premium services

This service is free, so to cover the costs Grou.ps displays ads on your network. You may still prefer to stop the ads and run your own ads by paying around $10 a month. They have an uppercap on disk space usage. Once the disk quota is used up the revenue flows on to grou.ps. Extra space can be bought @$5 per 5GB

Me and three others got our social network site in 20 minutes - WOW

After working around for a while a few minor glitches did appear. For example some times the profile pics do not appear after you comment on friend’s updates or posts. In another instance I had the page loading for ever but these issues vanish on refreshing the page.

Grou.ps has now around 2 million users and its continues to grow every day. One million users have joined the sites in the past 6 months.

Facebook Zombie (src: Huffingtonpost.com)

BBC discussed a report about Indian companies losing productivity as employees spend more and more time on Orkut, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Assocham (Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry) feels most of the people users during office hours while away company’s resources for “romantic” and other uses.

Here is some note worthy stats based on inputs form 4,000 corporate employees.

• On an average an employee wastes 1 hour a day on social networks accounting for 12.5% of productivity loss.
• 77% of employees who have Orkut accounts use them during work hours.
• 50% of Facebookers used office time to use Facebook for personal needs.
• 19% of corporate world allows Facebook for business purposes while 16% allows use for limited personal usage.
• Only 40% of responders say their company allows full access to social networks.
• Around 84% of responders from major cities show some sort of Internet addiction.

“As a matter of fact, [the] growing use of browsing sites can be dangerous for overall productivity and IT companies have already installed software to restrict its use,” Assocham secretary general DS Rawat said.

It is strange Twitter did not get a mention. I personally know friends in corporate world who are addicted tweeters. One of them (cant reveal name) tweets out at least 5 updates every hour. Guess what!  He gets over time bonus too.

Today social media is the hottest area for advertisement. Every big business concentrates its effort to spread the word on social networks whenever there is a new product launch. Sporting Gear Giant Adidas has taken this strategy seriously and churned out an online marketing campaign with an application combining Facebook Connect and Google Maps.

Star Wars Death Star Superlaser is set in the typical star war backdrop.

A new alliance under the command of Lord Vader, the evil empire has mobilized their ultimate weapon, the Death Star. The Space Station moves swiftly across the universe to a remote galaxy to deliver a message to a small blue planet called EARTH.

The application automatically scans your Facebook profile picture and targets your city on Google map, leaving a huge crater the shape of Adidas Logo. You can then choose friends from Facebook and use the map to blast away their street. A message is delivered to the user you wipe out from the surface of earth.

Vader Finds me on Earth

I was momentarily pissed off with Humanity for their inhuman action on Pandora ( Avatar Mania you see) and felt like blowing away some cities. So I targeted Greg’s San Francisco and Fardeen’s Dubai for some revenge.

Setting Target on Dubai

Blasted a Square in San Fransisco

Its amusing so give it a try. And yeah it does feature a nice collection of shoes.

Dont ask me what I want for X'mas

Brittany Murphy death was perhaps the real testament to Google’s realtime search ineffectiveness. I could ofcourse see several news alert but until i scrolled down to the middle of the page, i couldn’t find the real-time search results. Need to work on that Google. Meanwhile, I’m happy to stick with Twitter.

Read also Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land report Brittany Murphy’s Death & Google’s Real Time Search Results

Url shortening and tracking service provider bit.ly has launched a cool new feature. Welcome to bitly.tv – the place for webs most linked to videos.

homepage of bitly/tv

As you can see it is a very neatly laid out grid of the most popular videos on bit.y urls. These are aggregated data from its own site as shared by people on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other popular social media networks. Stumble upon and Diggs included too.

Once you are on the site they give you the current popular video items. There are options to browse popular videos yesterday and the day before. I had a little problem with the hover function. The whole line of video perks up instead of the particular video you are hovering on. On clicking your video of choice a light box serves you the video with live twitter streaming about the video and option to share the same on Twitter and Facebook. You could also mail it to your friend’s inbox.

Evian Ad on Bitly

The short url market place is heating up lately. Google launched its own sweet goo.gl couple of days ago. Social Media is influencing them all.

Techcruch reports Google and Yelp are in the past-term-sheet stage and are in the final stages of negotiation. Yelp’s expected Revenue for this year is rumoured to be around $50 million. Yelp was founded in 2004 to help people find great local businesses like dentists, hair stylists and mechanics. This is clearly a big winner for google and yelp. A huge congrats from the Mashyep team.

(img src : cybernetnews.com)

In a landmark development Microsoft has agreed to offer Windows users an option to choose browser after connecting to internet for the first time after installing windows. This declaration ends the long drawn battle between European Union and Microsoft over anti-trust issues. The issue was that with a pre installed browser in its Operating system Windows was discouraging fair competition.

Most of our readers would be aware that Internet Explorer comes bundled with every Windows platform, may it be Windows OS for PC or Windows Mobile for smart phones.

Browser market share has historically been an Internet Explorer playground but the trend is changing lately. Firefox is breathing down Microsoft’s neck with almost half of the market share to its now. Chrome, Safari and Opera are other tough contenders and combined make up for 12.5 % of the market. The rest is still with Internet Explorer (6,7,8).  The chart below will give you a clear idea of recent and current browser market share.

Browser Statistics Month by Month
(src: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

With this new ruling Microsoft is to roll out updates that will ask users to choose from among a list of important browsers. This will at least give other competitors a chance to reach the user. According to Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera –

This decision is also a celebration of open web standards, as these shared guidelines are the necessary ingredients for innovation on the web.

This is a victory for the future of the web.

Microsoft enjoyed market dominance for a long time for being the default browser on the most popular operating system. Though there are better browsers that are user friendly and technically advanced, they could not reach the public eye. Now things are changing for good and such fair trade rulings will help change things for better.

In startling news, Microsoft today admitted that the code behind its Chinese micro-blogging site Zuku is partly stolen material. With this curtains descend on Zuku for an indefinite period. Microsoft has issued a public apology to users as well as Plurk, from whom the code-lifting was done.

Plurk, a Canadian micro-blogging start up alleges that Microsoft (MSN China) has carbon copied around 80% of their code-base. Not only the look and feel of the site has been duplicated but the working code and data structures are exact replicas of Plurks’. Calling it a “Broad Daylight Robbery”, Plurk feels ‘incredulous” that market leaders like Microsoft are resorting to code robbery.

Microsoft issued a public statement over this shameful event.  According to them –

The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.

Did not the Plurk guys say, its somewhere near 80% code theft? In that case the “portion” that Microsoft mentions must be a very big portion actually.

So the blame is now on the third party vendor. What is the truth only god knows or may be Microsoft knows. Initially tech bloggers and Taiwanese users of Zuku reported the similarities between Plurk and Zuku. After a deep digging by Plurk team the truth is out.

Snapshots Provided by Plurk