Well, we all know what happened close to the end of this year, right? The financial crisis hit the finance and automotive sectors extremely hard, but the whole high tech industry was also heavily impacted. This also left its traces on the Web, even resulted in a number of Web 2.0 startups having to close their doors.

But what (good ;-) happened during the rest of this year on the Internet? Let's take a look at some things I personally found very interesting and see if you agree:

• First of all, Twitter really took off. I do not have the exact numbers at this very moment, but I remember CNET reporting an explosive growth of both Twitter users and so-called "tweets". Twitter is a nice service that lets you send small text messages to all people who are "following" you - so to say a "one-to-many" instant messaging tool. If you do not know it already you should definitely check it out.
• Yahoo had a very shaky year. First it was nearly acquired by Microsoft, then Carl Icahn bought quite some stock and put the board under pressure. When they finally had the chance to do a promising ad deal with Google, the deal was brought down because of antitrust concerns. Now they are trying to do something regarding Web TV with Intel, we will see if they are more lucky there or whether they stick with their bad luck in the New Year...
• For me, 2008 was also the year of the mobile Internet. If you look at the statistics of cellular network providers you will see a tremendous growth of Internet packets delivered via UMTS/3G networks starting in Summer. The major reason for this growth was the arrival of the iPhone 3G around that time and since Apple has very likely sold more than the originally planned 10 Mio devices by the end of this year, this growth will likely go on.
• This in turn has also impacted what kind of Web apps are "hot": Virtual worlds are out, mobile Web apps are in, especially those running on Apple's iPhone or Google Android. Just take a look, e.g., at "Fring": a nice free app that brings Skype calls and instant messaging to the iPhone and other mobile devices. And the trend to mobile Web apps will likely continue in 2009 if you look at the tremendous growth of Web-enabled applications in Apple's App Store!
• Web 2.0 has become more serious. Just take a look at Apple's MobileMe or Adobe's Web-version of Photoshop. We are also seeing a 2nd coming of the Application Service Provider (ASP), now called "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Even Microsoft's Ray Ozzie has announced details of their cloud initiative called "Azure". We are also seeing that the browser vendors including Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari) and Google (see below ;-) are reacting to this development by adding "just-in-time" (JIT) compilers for JavaScript in order to speed up native Web 2.0 (AJAX) applications (I don't know about Microsoft's IE).
• Finally, Google has launched its own browser called "Chrome". Google Chrome adds a number of innovative features such as, e.g., the concept of running each tab as a separate process in order that if one Web app crashes, only this tab crashes and not the rest of the browser with it. Even though I like Safari, I am already looking forward to the Mac version that is said to become available in 2009 - always eager to try out something interesting and new ;-).

What about myself? I was able to grow Onepoint from a startup to a small, profitable software company I am very proud of. I started this blog, beside my other blog "Task 1". I did some other projects including Firetask (a new kind of task management application for the iPhone) and we finished a plan to build a rooftop apartment in a nice part of my hometown. So, many things have been going on and most of this stuff is far from being finished yet, this is also why I did not have much time to blog during these last few months.

Let's see how the New Year starts - I am already looking forward to an exciting year 2009!