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At the beginning of each year I traditionally publish a list of my favorite startups and products. This is the fourth year I’ve done this - previous lists: 2006, 2007, 2008. You guys get to pick the winners of the Crunchies - this list is all mine.

This is a list of the products I tend to use daily. Some are for work (Wordpress, Delicious, Zoho, etc.), some are for fun (MySpace Music, Hulu, etc), and some are useful for both (Digg, Skype, YouTube, etc.). But I use most of them every day, or nearly every day, and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them.

The list changes a bit from year to year, and is also getting longer (see chart). Just three products have been favorites all four years: TechMeme, Skype, Wordpress. TechMeme continues to be the news aggregator I check multiple times per day to keep up on tech news. Skype is the instant messaging and VoIP platform that I use most often, and Wordpress software powers all of our blogs.

I’ve added nine new products, including one gadget (which I’ve left off in the past): Animoto, Friendfeed, Hulu, iPhone 3G, MySpace Music, Pandora (which was on in previous years) Docstoc/Scribd and Yammer.

I’ve removed six products from last year’s list: Amazon Music, Amie Street, Firefox, Flickr, Netvibes, Technorati.

I still use the products I’ve removed, just not as much as in previous years. I find I’m just using Netvibes and Technorati less this year (Netvibes because Google Reader is so excellent, Technorati has fallen in favor of Google Blog Search mostly because it’s too slow and has too many internal links). I tend to upload photos to Facebook now because of the people tagging feature and since it flows well with the rest of my news feed (I use Posterous for mobile uploads); Flickr is becoming less important for me. I have moved most of my music consumption to MySpace Music, and download DRM-free MP3s from iTunes when I want to buy. Amie Street is still a great place to discover new music though, and I think their business model, which is variable pricing for music based on its popularity, is sound. Firefox is off the list as I experiment with Chrome, but I haven’t made a decision one way or the other. When Chrome launches for the Mac, I’m likely to switch.

As in past years, there are a gaggle of other great products that I use regularly but didn’t add to the list in order to keep it manageable. I also haven’t added individual iPhone apps that I use daily, even though they are nearly as important to productivity and fun as the products that did make the list. Next year I expect more than a few will be added.

Here?s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn?t live without:

800-Free-411

800-Free-411 first made the list in 2007 and it isn’t leaving any time soon. Use it to make free directory assistance calls and avoid per call charges of up to $3.50 that cell phone carriers charge. The company has taken more than 6% of the market for directory service calls in the U.S. Google, Microsoft, AT&T and others have entered the market, but Jingle Networks, the company offering the product, has a patent on the idea of pairing advertising with free directory service. Here’s a tip: add “FREE411USA” as a Skype contact and do lookups that way, too.

Animoto

Animoto, which joins the list for the first time this year, does one thing, and well: it creates slide shows from photos. Unlike all the other services on the list, I don’t use it daily. But their new iPhone application put it over the edge this year. I really like this service.

Delicious

Social bookmarking site Delicious has been on the list for three of the four years (I took a brief detour in 2007 to a competing service called Blue Dot, then switched back). Delicious 2.0 is finally stable and the Firefox add-on is the reason I keep using it. Also, they long ago switched away from the annoying del.icio.us domain name, so I don’t have to look up where the dots go every time I visit the site.

Digg

Digg has been on the list the last three years. The site remains a fun place to hang out when I have some spare time to review the news, and Digg is one of our top ten sources of traffic. Hacker News is another Digg-like news site that focuses on tech that I visit daily as well.

Facebook

I visit Facebook daily to keep up with what my 5,000 closest friends are up to. I’m not a big fan of most of the applications that have launched on Facebook, but I do use it for photos and events. Unlike last year, though, I also now use MySpace as well regularly to reach people. These are the two social networks you have to be on to keep in touch with everyone.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed, a microblogging and activity aggregating service, only officially launched in February 2008. I use the service daily, although I’m not nearly as addicted as some bloggers are to the service. But like Twitter, Friendfeed is a good place to find breaking news on a variety of topics, and it’s become a must have service.

Gmail

I’ve never been a fan of the way Gmail groups message threads, and things like tagging of messages could be improved, but the service is far and away superior to any other web mail service in terms of features (Yahoo Mail has the best user interface in my opinion). I continue to rely on Gmail as my main personal email provider. Once Gears is integrated for offline use, I may stop accessing it via IMAP.

Google Reader

Three years ago I was using Bloglines to read feeds. Then I tried NetNewsWire for a while. But Google Reader, which first launched in October 2005 as a seriously flawed product, continues to evolve and is by far the best feed reader on the market today.

Hulu

Hulu isn’t about work, it’s about watching TV and films after the work is done. I openly mocked the service for nearly a year as they fumbled around, but now here it is, on a list of sites I visit constantly. I spend more time watching Hulu than I do normal cable television.

iPhone 3G

The first gadget I’ve included over the years - the iPhone 3G, which was announced on June 9, 2008, is simply the best device I’ve ever used. Sure, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard. But I can actually browse the web with this thing, and that more than makes up for a slower typing speed. This is a beautiful thing.

MySpace Music

MySpace Music is just a couple of months old and is still very buggy, but it changed the way users think about music on a big scale. MySpace combined its millions of band/artist pages with legal and free streaming music from the labels and creating a very compelling music product. Services like LaLa have a better user experience, but they still charge for streaming. Free is the future of music.

Pandora

Pandora, an Internet radio service that creates stations based on music you like, was on the list the first two years. I still listen to it all the time, and their new iPhone application put it over the top again to get on this year’s list. Pandora was one of the first startups we covered on TechCrunch, and they recently passed 20 million registered users.

Scribd & Docstoc

We use both Docstoc and Scribd here at TechCrunch regularly. Both services let you upload office type documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, etc.) and then embed them on other sites. When there’s a lawsuit complaint or interesting PDF, we add it to one of the services and embed it in our post.

Skype

Skype Skype has been on my list every year and I expect it will stay there. It’s the most important productivity tool that I have - I’d give up email before I gave up Skype.

TechMeme

TechMeme is another four-year favorite. It is the blogosphere’s daily newspaper, and one of the sites we use most often in seeing how stories develop. I’m amazed that founder Gabe Rivera hasn’t accepted any of the many buyout offers I’ve heard he’s been floated. In December 2008 TechMeme gave up on fully automated news, which I believe changes the site for the worse.

TripIt

If you travel a lot, you are going to love TripIt, which returns to the list this year. It keeps you organized, it’s incredibly easy to use and it’s just a perfect, simple service. Read our post on TripIt to get an idea for how it works. You forward confirmation emails from flights, hotels, etc. to the service and it creates an itinerary automatically. You can then access it via a mobile device.

Twitter

Last year a lot of people still hadn’t heard about microblogging service Twitter. Now, Britney is on it and the company is turning down half-billion dollar buyout offers. I mostly access Twitter through a desktop client called Twhirl, and I check it multiple times per day.

Wordpress

We continue to use Wordpress open source software to power all of our blogs, and it has been on the list all four years. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend - without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them.

Yammer

Yammer, a spin off of a startup called Geni, is a newcomer this year. They launched at TechCrunch50 in the Fall and took the top prize. The service acts as a Twitter for businesses, letting employees send messages back and forth to subscribers. It’s way more effective than email at group communications, and we absolutely rely on it here at TechCrunch.

YouTube

YouTube has been on the list the last three years. I continue to burn time watching random videos on the site, and we use it to upload our own videos as well. Sure they sent us a Cease & Desist letter a while back, but I still love em.

Zoho

Zoho, as well as its competitor Google Docs, continues to replace Microsoft Office for most of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. The feature list is still light compared to the heavy, expensive Microsoft version, but its free and I can collaborate with others on documents. This is the future of office productivity.

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We have information from a trusted source that the latest Palm smartphone running the Nova operating system will be launched Thursday. The new phone will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide down under a portrait-oriented touchscreen. This only a mock-up based on information received. The new operating system is described as "amazing" and there will be a full software bazaar on launch. It will have media playback functions along with standard Palm calendar, email, and contact functionality.

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Me2, a new app that just went live on the App Store, allows users to transfer their contact information in a way that is sure to stir up some familiar (and perhaps not so fond) memories for any computer user over the age of 12. Using similar technology to the modems of yesteryear, the free application transfers data between two iPhones using a brief series of audible chirps. To send a contact, users simply push their phones together, select which contact they’d like to send, and wait for the 1-second burst of sound to transfer their information. It might be old school, but it’s very cool.

And while the technology involved may be relatively ancient, it’s also potentially more practical than some of the other solutions we’ve seen. Apps like FriendBook and Nameo use geolocation to figure out when two nearby phohnes are attempting to send information, and then relay it over the network. This works fine if you’ve got a full signal, but you might not be so lucky in the depths of a corporate office. Because Me2 doesn’t rely on GPS or the cellular network, it should work everywhere.

That said, this ‘beeping’ form of communication also has its issues. Because the phones literally have to ‘hear’ each other, you’ll need to position them so that their speakers and microphones are touching, which might be a bit awkward in a business environment. And while the screeching sounds of yore might have their charm, it would be nice if the apps used an inaudible frequency to transfer the data (which we’ve been told is possible).

Me2 is currently only advertised as working on the iPhone 3G (some reviews indicate that it won’t allow users to communicate to the first generation iPhone), but it’s likely that these issues could be remedied in future updates. The application is also only allows for one contact transfer at a time, though this too could probably be easily changed.

I’ve made no secret that I think business cards are a pain in the ass. Me2 probably won’t be the app to replace the paper cards once and for all (I suspect a wireless technology like Bluetooth would be more secure and less awkward), but it’s still a cool idea and is worth checking out if for nothing else than its novelty factor.

Last month we saw a similar modem technology employed by Electric Smoke, a virtual cigarette app that uses audio to communicate with Smule’s Sonic Lighter.

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If you’re a regular IM user with an iPhone, chances are you’ve heard of BeeJiveIM. Long established as a top choice IM app for BlackBerry, the iPhone release rocketed up to the #2 best selling application in the iTunes Social Networking category for 2008 - even with the eye-widening $16 price tag.

On Tuesday, January 6th, BeeJive will be pushing version 2.0 of BeeJiveIM for iPhone to the iTunes App Store. We were able to get our hands on a pre-release copy of it, and we’ve brought back pictures of everything new and noteworthy.

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When AppLoop launched its self-service platform for tracking and advertising on mobile applications last July, we were quite impressed. Leveraging the iPhone 3G?s native GPS capabilities, AppLoop’s geo-aware mobile ad network was able to tell when a consumer was close to a specified business address and serve up ads for that business accordingly.

Last October, the startup came out with the App Generator, a nifty tool that turned any online publication with an RSS feed into a separate iPhone application.

Now, we’re hearing rumors that the startup is in trouble, and they appear to hold some truth. For one, the company’s website has been down for the past two days. Worse, a quick glance on Twitter suggests that the service’s downtime is also causing iPhone apps using AppLoop libraries to crash.

We would hate to see the young company fade away, so we’re hoping this is a technical glitch which is simply taking a lot of time to repair. But the two startup’s founders are eerily silent about the downtime on their blogs and Twitter accounts, so it might be idle hope.

We’ve contacted AppLoop and will update this post accordingly as soon as we get some insight on what’s happening.

Update: after an e-mail from co-founder Eric Kerr, we’re putting the company in the deadpool as they effectively had to shut the service down ‘for a variety of financial and legal based reasons’. Kerr claims users have been sent an e-mail several weeks ago and that some might not have received it. I’m not so sure, but I definitely think it’s bad form not to put a message on your website or blog about the demise of your company.

(Hat tip to Philip Roy for the heads up)

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We got a tip that Facebook Polls, the social networking service’s business tool that enabled anyone to create a paid poll targetting a pre-defined group of users, is no longer available. The link that used to redirect to the service is now effectively forwarded to the Facebook homepage, and you won’t find any reference of Facebook Polls anywhere on the company’s business or advertising pages. What happened?

Update: Facebook has acknowledged putting Facebook Polls on hold following a technical migration last October which raised some questions internally about the priority for the product. They advise users to switch to one of the many polling applications available on the service.
Statement:

“The ability to create Facebook Polls is no longer available on the public site, though users may still receive Facebook Polls created internally by Facebook. Facebook is exploring options for making a polling product publicly available again in the future but has no definite plans to discuss at this point.”

When Facebook Polls launched back in June 2007, we called it a dream product for brand marketers and market researchers. Users could create a poll and target users based gender, age, location or profile keyword. Facebook charged a variable fee based on how quickly you wanted results, and based on how many results you wanted and how much you were wiling to pay per result. Prices ranged from $.10 to $1.00 per data point, plus an initial $5 insertion fee, and the polls appeared in Facebook users? news feed so more people could become aware of the service.

Back then, Facebook had only 20+ million users on the social network - it has more than six times that amount today - and Polls seemed like a great way to monetize the appeal and engagement of Facebook’s user based on demographics. On the other hand, there was some criticism regarding the pricing and the fact that Facebook Polls delivered statistically insignificant results.

Anyone care to take a wild guess why they decided to pull the service?

(I have contacted Facebook PR and will update this post if and when I get word back.)

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New York/Silicon Valley based SkyGrid offers users who are willing to pay a per seat license of $500/month a browser based premium real time news service that competes with super-profitable Bloomberg terminals and other services. The service first launched publicly in February 2008, and as of November 2008 the company said they had 100 paying customers.

The paid Skygrid service lets users personalize and filter the real time news stream from blogs and traditional new sites, and it also tries to detect “sentiment” via an algorithm that guesses what the tone of the article is. That’s a big plus for traders trying to make quick decisions on which way the market is going. Publications and authors are also ranked by authority.

But now, we’ve learned, the company is preparing to offer a free version of the service that anyone can use.

The paid version is really only attractive to private equity funds and individual traders that need a jump on the news to get better returns on stock trades. Few others are going to pay $500/month for a premium news service.

The free version, though, may be the future of news aggregation. Our understanding is that there is little attempt to cluster news items as Google News and TechMeme do to try and rank stories. Rather, it presents a personalized, filtered stream based on company, sector, topic and industry settings you make.

In the future you may go to sites like Google News and TechMeme to see what the important stories of the day are. But you’ll go to sites like SkyGrid to monitor all the important news around topics you care deeply about. As a blogger, I really look forward to the new service.

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Version 1.0 of Power Twitter, an add-on for Firefox created by Narendra Rocherolle at 83 Degrees, was just released. If you use Twitter and were excited about services like Tweetree, this is something you’ll want to add immediately.

Power Twitter moves Twitter Search, inconveniently located on a different subdomain, right into the Twitter site itself. You can also just search a single user’s updates from that user’s Twitter page. Twitter should have long ago integrated a search box directly onto the logged-in Twitter home page. They haven’t, but Power Twitter fixes this.

Power Twitter also fixes the @replies feature, which currently only shows Twitter messages directed to you that begin with @[yourusername]. With Power Twitter you see all messages that contain your user name, fixing a big hole on Twitter.

YouTube, Flickr, and TwitPic links are also added in-line to Twitter messages so you don’t have to click off site to see them. This is something competitor Friendfeed does and is an often-requested feature.

Another feature I like: you can mouse over a user icon and see the last few Twitter messages they’ve written. This helps to put current messages into context to understand the conversation.

Other features: you can click on the Facebook tab on the right and see updates for your Facebook friends directly in Twitter.

In summary, this is the way to fix Twitter, directly via the user interface, not from a third party site that users will forget to go to.

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New European streaming music service Spotify, which TechCrunch UK has been tracking since October, is getting increasingly good reviews. Spotify is a downloadable client for Windows and Mac users that lets you search, browse and stream a deep collection of music. Sadly, it is only available in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Spain and France and you need an invitation to join (InviteShare is actively trading them).

The user experience is beyond even the best web based streaming services like LaLa, MySpace Music and Imeem. It acts like a fully stocked iTunes, with everything hyperlinked to easily find related music. Creating playlists is a snap. There is no way to move music outside of the application, or onto music devices. But it is the best way to legally find and stream music for free that I’ve seen

I have no invitation and I live in the U.S., but I’ve been using Spotify all afternoon. There have previously been posts on getting into the service from a banned location once you have an invitation using a proxy server. Today on Digg, though, a commenter left instructions on how to use Spotify without an invitation. I tried it, and it works (for now).

Invite yourself from anywhere:
1) go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
2) enter the following URL: https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/
3) Create your account, for UK postcode - check http://www.postcodesearch.org.uk/

It’s likely that the proxy server will be banned shortly, but there are countless others in the non-banned countries. The important thing is to visit this URL from that proxy server. And I recommend you do it now, before the hole is plugged.

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Blogging platform JournalSpace (which I’d never heard of to date) has ceased to be, following a wipe-out of the main database for which there was no back-up in place. According to the JournalSpace blog, the database was overwritten as a result of a malicious act from a disgruntled ex-employee.

It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.

More information is available here.

The company set up a Twitter account which it used for updates, and reading the messages in reverse chronological order is telling enough. If your blog was hosted on JournalSpace, you can visit this helpful blog post with instructions on how to save most of your content and comments using Google Cache.

JournalSpace had apparently been around for 6 years, and will now be releasing its source code to the open source community, and possibly sell off the domain name and trademarks.

By the way, when’s the last time you backed up all the data on your computer?

(Via Slashdot)

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Looks like software giant EMC has acquired SourceLabs, provider of a set of tools and services used to support open source software like Linux, at least according to TechFlash.

The company sells subscriptions for enterprise support, maintenance, and upgrades for open source software, including SASH, offers a proprietary Open Source Management System and is also behind the wiki website SWiK, a community project that documents open source software.

The acquisition fee remains undisclosed, and like Matt Asay over at CNET, we’re not really sure what the reason behind EMC’s decision was. He also mentions that SourceLabs had been shopping collaboration project SWiK separately for a couple of weeks to no avail, so it’s highly unlikely EMC bought SourceLabs for the community site rather than the people, know-how and client list. It also seems EMC used its brand new subsidiary Decho, formed from two previous acquired companies Mozy and Pi Corp, for this acquisition.

SourceLabs raised $7 million in venture funding in October 2006 from Madrona Venture Group, which led the round, Ignition Partners and Index Ventures.

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When 8020 Media, the publisher of JPG Magazine, announced its shutdown on January 1, CEO Mitchell Fox told friends via email that they just couldn’t turn the corner on revenue in the down economy, despite being close to profitable before the downturn.

In a blog post, the company said they unsuccessfully sought out buyers and investors to keep the company alive. But the attention the site received after the announced shutdown changed things, it seems, and a number of buyers have now approached the company to buy it and keep it alive (SmugMug is one of them, it seems).

JPG Magazine was an attempt to create a photography magazine that relied on its readers for its content and included them in the editing process. Nearly 200,000 photographers have submitted photographs for consideration to JPG, many of them via Flickr. The site itself was able to attract about 300,000 unique U.S. viewers a month (Quantcast), but its business model relied on selling print ads.

According to two sources we’ve talked to, the company is in the process of taking bids from interested buyers now, and there are already firm offers on the table which are attractive to the company’s current stockholders, including founding investor Minor Ventures. A deadline for offers has been set for early next week, with a very quick close immediately afterward to preserve as much brand value as possible (not to mention the fact that employees have now been laid off, so any rehires need to be done quickly).

Can new management make JPG a success? The dead tree publishing business is a bit suicidal in my opinion, but JPG Magazine may still be an exception. As I wrote in 2006, JPG Magazine had very low content costs, a vibrant online community of photographers, and a beautiful product that deserves a place on people’s coffee tables. When print media eventually moves completely to the Internet, hopefully a few publications like JPG Magazine will still be around.

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Today’s featured Elevator Pitch comes from Toksta, a browser-based instant message/chat client that can be integrated into most websites with only a few snippets of code. The service supports text, voice, and video (Flash is required for the latter two), and is free. The site generates revenue by placing ads in the browser-based chat windows, and allows site owners to participate in a revenue sharing agreement (you can also pay for a premium, ad-free whitelabel version).

The site is up against a few other services (like meebo’s recently launched Community IM), but its voice and video offerings may help set it apart. You can try the chat out for yourself on MyHappyPlanet, where you’ll need to register an account first. In practice it seems to work pretty well, though the ads (which can include audio) can be a bit jarring.

Oh yeah, according to the pitch the first 10 people to sign up will apparently get a free puppy, sent “via mail” (I sincerely hope that he is joking). If you’d like a puppy though, you can get one for free here (you won’t regret it).

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CatholicGoogle, a new site based on Google’s custom search, is “striving to provide an easy to use resource to anyone wanting to learn more about Catholicism and provide a safer way for good Catholics to surf the web.” The site uses a permanently-on Google SafeSearch to filter out profanity and pornography, along with a filter for specific topics that floats Catholic-related sites to the top. For example, a search for “birth control” serves up pages on why birth control is viewed as a sin in the Catholic Church as its first results.

The search engine might appeal to some devout Catholics if it actually worked. However, it seems that when it comes to filtering topics beyond the standard “offensive” categories (swear words and sex) , CatholicGoogle only serves to make queries potentially more offensive. A search for “drunk” yields a video of “Drunk Catholic Kids”. Perhaps even more bizarre: a search for “sex” offers an article bashing the Church’s stance on sexuality (they may have included this in the results for a balanced alternative perspective, but I doubt it). It’s as if the site just appends the word “Catholic” to whatever you’re searching for and crosses its fingers.

If this is your sort of thing, you might also be interested in GodTube, the YouTube for Christians or Gospelr (you guessed it - the Twitter for Christians).

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Application platforms, broadly defined, are here to stay. Facebook’s platform, first launched in 2007, now has tens of thousands of applications. MySpace, which mostly relies on Google’s OpenSocial platform, has 4,500 apps available to users, and 211 million applications have been installed. The iPhone, which only launched its App Store in July 2008, has more than 10,000 applications, and they’ve been downloaded 300 million times.

These application platforms may even become a significant platform for more mainstream PC usage. Android is now being hacked to work on netbooks, and we believe Apple has plans to release a large form factor iPod Touch running their App Store platform. It’s not inconceivable that Microsoft would build this type of software distribution mechanism directly into Windows in the future.

But there’s a big gaping hole in all existing platforms. None have a direct payments platform to let applications collect micropayments from users.

Today app developers on Facebook and MySpace can create revenue by showing advertisements at very low CPMs. On the iPhone/iPod, developers can also charge for applications at the time of sale.

Both of these are great ways to make some money on software. But the third leg of the stool, micropayments for things like virtual gifts and other things, has been largely ignored to date.

There are Facebook applications that have found a way around the problem by using third party payment services. Spare Change (powered by PayPal), Social Gold, Zong and other services let users move cash into the system, and applications like Mob Wars have gathered as much as $1 million per month from micropayments.

All three services have promised that direct micropayments are coming. Facebook promised the product would be released by September, but it never came and it is clearly on the back burner for now. MySpace announced their product in November 2008, but won’t way when its coming.

My guess is neither MySpace nor Facebook will launch a direct payments platform. There’s just too many headaches to deal with - fraud, chargebacks and security issues bring real costs and real liability. Duplicating PayPal’s infrastructure just isn’t cost effective.

Both will likely partner with a third party or parties to bring an approved service. They do this with other services (both Facebook and MySpace outsource classifieds to Oodle, for example). They don’t have to bother with building anything, and they can try to get a cut of the fees generated.

Apple, though, will almost certainly do it themselves. They’ve already built out the basic payments platform through iTunes. Adding in payments for services won’t be that much additional work.

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