Year in review: On Web, innovation meets hard times

On the Web, as in other sectors of the economy, 2008 will be remembered as the beginning of an economic downturn. There's no avoiding the fact that a lot of people lost their jobs.

But letting what happened at the end of the year color our thinking could lead us to overlook impressive innovation and progress in Web start-ups and online technology in general. The glimmer of hope: more companies are hiring people than firing people--even though the overall number of jobs lost far outstrips jobs gained.

The Web 2.0 battleground remained not just a fight for users of services, but a fight for developers. Competing standards for online applications, media, identity, and social networks duked it out in 2008 and will continue to do so in 2009. Many of the battles put open-source standards--such as OpenID for identity--against "walled gardens" run by single companies.

Social-network giant Facebook, for example, has been strategically slow to embrace standards, opting for its own identity system (Facebook Connect) instead of embracing OpenID, and for its own application platform as opposed to the emerging Open Social platform.

This year Microsoft finally admitted that the traditional Office suite software concept is running out of gas and revealed that it's working on online versions of its productivity apps. However, in typical Microsoft fashion, the announcement predated the actual planned release of the product by months. Meanwhile, Google Docs improved--it's now a full suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. And Zoho rolled out lots of little cloud-based productivity and business apps on top of its online office suite.

Google also launched its own browser this year--not just a little labs project, but a solid, very fast, and increasingly popular Web browser with usability improvements over front-runner products by Microsoft and Mozilla. Market share for Chrome grew to measurable levels after only a few months. One hundred days after Google launched it into beta, the company announced the software was ready for the mainstream. (Meanwhile, long-standing Gmail remains in beta.)

On the browser front, Firefox version 3 launched, and easily blew by Mozilla's goal to be the app most downloaded in one day, even though the day got started late. Internet Explorer 8 also went into beta this year.

Many pundits predicted a widespread move of software to Web-based services, or the "cloud," and there was a lot of talk of application vendors using suites like Amazon Web Services to host their products. However, outages at Amazon Web Services and at Google's App Engine dimmed enthusiasm for the concept. Even though the outages were brief, the expectations for these infrastructure providers were immense. Other Web service and app failures this year included Twitter (repeatedly), Gmail (twice), Facebook, and Netflix.

Twitter got competitors the year with the emergence of business-focused services like Yammer, Presently, and Socialcast. During Twitter's midyear outages, the new social feed aggregator FriendFeed picked up Twitter's disaffected users. Twitter is running reliably again. Still, the company is still not making money, although the founders want people to believe they have a plan.

Also this year, Google added the capability for users to rank search results for themselves, but the rankings don't--yet--influence what other users see on search result pages.

Semantic search did not take off this year, as some expected. The highly-hyped PowerSet search start-up did not deliver its end-user product and was instead acquired by Microsoft. It remains to be seen what Redmond does with the technology. Cuil, founded by a Google ex-pat, launched another eagerly-anticipated natural-language search product, but at launch the service simply did not work.

Also in the category of things that didn't happen: Twitter was not acquired by Facebook. Yahoo was not bought by Microsoft.

The 2008 presidential election was watchable online in several ways, from clever apps to live-streamed debates on Current, Hulu, and the sites of more traditional television networks. A popular Twitter page showed the real-time zeitgeist during debates and during the election.

Speaking of voting, in CNET's annual Webware 100 awards, nearly 2 million votes were cast to pick the top Web applications. For the second year in a row, the top vote-getting social network was Gaia, illustrating the awesome power of the teen-girl demographic.

Finally, the Web left Earth in 2008. The interplanetary network that Vint Cerf envisioned years ago got its first real test.