It’s that time of year again…

In between — or to go along with — holiday shopping, we’re starting to see 2009’s “top” products, services, applications, etc. being touted.

Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb listed their top mobile web apps and have followed up today with their list of the top 10 consumer web apps of the year.

With regard to the consumer apps, they note that there are hundreds of new ones to choose from but “occasionally, we come across a service that stands out from the pack because it offers a novel solution, disrupts the way incumbent market leaders do business or changes the way we experience the Web.”  Not all the apps are newly launched, but reached a mainstream audience this year.

The mobile web apps heavily feature those for the iPhone as one might expect, but there is a mix of others.

Briefly, the mobile group includes:  Facebook 3.0 (iPhone), Tweetie 2 (iPhone), Twidroid – see image – (Android), Foursquare (Cross-platform), Google Voice, (Blackberry, Android), Spotify (Cross-Platform), Google Maps Navigation (Android), Layer (iPhone, Android), and a couple more.  See the article for details.

Among the top consumer apps are 2 search engines, Bing and WolframAlpha.  A couple of my favorites are included: light blogging site Posterous (here’s an example) and Tweetdeck, which I’ve recently posted about.  Of course, RWW didn’t leave off huge favorites like Twitter and Facebook.  See the article for more apps and information.

Google Maps has another upgrade, although small, to make it even more useful.  You can now switch seamlessly between Maps and Street View when you’re looking for an address.

When you search Google Maps you’ll find an option beneath the search result to go to Street View which takes you a street-level view with a marker right at the address or place you searched for.  From there you can use the usual Street View tools to zoom around and look at the surroundings.

You also get a “Search nearby” feature which then takes you back to Maps to see other places.  Click on any of them to go back to Street View and see that location relative to others in the area.  In the image below I searched for Majestic Bay Theater and then did a “search nearby” for a coffee place.

There is a nice video demonstration that shows how it works.

Google Maps will now show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads when that information is available.  I count myself fortunate to live in one of those ciites because I have just about given up on freeway travel and regularly use arterials to get around in Seattle.

Just go to Google Maps (which is free), zoom-in on the city you’re interested in, and click the “Traffic” button in the upper-right corner of the map.  As you zoom in closer to an area of interest, both arterial roads and highways will show current traffic conditions through color-coding.  The colors correspond to the speed of traffic relative to the speed limit of the road.  “Green is free sailing, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic.”

How does Google Maps know about traffic conditions?  They use anonymous data from those who have Google Maps for Mobile and turn on the “my location” feature of of their GPS-enabled mobile phones.  If you’ve heard of “crowdsourcing,” this is an example of it in action.  Read more about how this works here.  Increasingly mobile phones either come with the feature built in (such as the T-Mobile MyTouch) or it can be downloaded and used.

If you have Google Maps for Mobile, you can see the same traffic data while you’re on the road (stuck in traffic?) and add to it, too.  The information could improve your morning commute, your trip through town when major sports or other events are scheduled, or just help get you to the airport on time.

“Your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving.  When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions.  We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.  It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.”

I used to do quite a bit of screencasting and was happy to have Camtasia Studio to allow me to do a number of functions.  But these days, I’m only likely to need a simple (and preferably easy) app.

Screenr just launched yesterday.  It is a free app that runs inside your browser (nothing to download!), with the twist that when you are finished recording you can send your video directly to your Twitter followers.  Before you send your screencast to Twitter, you can review your recording and add a description, says ReadWriteWeb.

You don’t have to send your video to Twitter, but for a lot of users, this will be the main reason to use Screenr. “The integration with Twitter also goes one step further, as you can re-tweet a screencast right from within the application and when you leave a comment, you can also choose to send it to Twitter as an @reply to the author.”

You can also embed your video in a blog post, upload it directly to YouTube, or download it to your desktop for more editing.  Check out the Screenr home page for a short video tour and a number of examples of screencasts that users have created.

Screenr has a lot of competition.  We have mentioned Jing here before.  All screencasters have a similar range of features, but with Screenr it is extremely easy to record a video and share it with your Twitter friends.  If you don’t already have a free Twitter account, this is a good time to get with it.

Gmail Labs is making it possible for us to add more gadgets to Gmail if we choose.  The first thing you need to do from your Gmail is to activate Gadgets by going to Settings, then Labs, and enabling “Add any gadget by URL.”  It’s at the bottom of the list at the moment.  Be sure to save changes.

Now navigate to Settings > Gadgets in order to add new gadgets.  They are all added by copying in a URL and saving your settings when you are finished.  Makeuseof.com has a list of URLs for 10 gadgets you might be interested in.

You probably won’t want them all in your sidebar.  If you are often on your Gmail page and wish you had easy access there to Twitter, too, you can add the TwitterGadget by copying in the URL from makeuseof.com’s post.  I tried it out just to see how it worked and it looked pretty usable.

I already have ways I manage Twitter, however, so I deleted the gadget and looked at the other possibilities.  They include Wikipedia, FriendFeed, World Clock (which I have on my Calendar), Digg, Calculator, Facebook and MySpace, none of which I decided I wanted in my Gmail sidebar.  (If you add several of these, it is handy to be able to minimize them when you don’t need them.)

However, the URL shortener, bit.ly, looked like just the thing — I frequently send links in my gmails and they can be quite long.  I added the gadget (the URL is long: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/107368512201818821991/bitly-shortener.xml) and found a use for it right in the next message I composed.  Works fine.

I already have the bit.ly URL shortener in my Bookmarks Toolbar, but having this gadget easily at hand in Gmail is great.  By the way, Firefox also has an extension called bit.ly preview so you can see “what lurks” beneath a bit.ly-shortened URL when you encounter one.  You might like to know before you go there.

Avoid text-heavy blog entries and/or dress up your website with multimedia used according to the creators’ specifications.

Here are free resources you can use, including some of my favorite go-to sites such as Everystockphoto, Stock.XCHNG, and Creative Commons-licensed images that can be found using search engines and Flickr.

I hadn’t seen this wiki before of copyright-friendly resources from teachers and librarians.  It contains a number of government and non-profit organization sites.

See Mashable’s post for the complete list including a number of free audio sources such as the Internet Archives’ open source audio.

Let’s say you are mapping out a destination and want to search for several things along the route, such as gas statons and restaurants.  Now you can accomplish that with ease.

After your second search, you’ll see a blue bar at the bottom of the left panel.  Expand it with a click which allows you to see your searches and turn them on or off.  Resulting markers are color-coded so you can tell which is which (notice the colored dot by the search name).

Another useful option was recently added to Google Maps — “What’s Here?“  Just right-click somewhere on a map and it will bring up a menu with options including “What’s here?” so you can get more information.

I opened my Gmail this morning and saw that a new feature has been added.  The image below popped right up to inform me and I’ve already made use of drag and drop convenience.

There’s a new location for labels — right above your chat list and grouped with Inbox, Drafts, etc.

Gmail starts you out with the two labels you most commonly use, but you can easily change the settings to show more, less, or others.  Hiding some labels clears the clutter and the real estate, but you can access them quickly by clicking the “more” link.  To show, hide or delete a label, click the down arrow to its left and choose from the menu.

Want to overhaul your labels in general?  Go to Settings > Labels and edit in bulk.

You can drag messages onto a label, or drag the label to the message.  It’s easy.  See the Official Gmail blog for illustrations.

I read about a new decision-making website called Hunch in the Seattle Times.

Started last year by a group of computer scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hunch hopes to combine the insight of large groups of people with artificial intelligence to provide a good answer to all your questions.  Caterina Fake, who co-founded successful photo sharing site Flickr, has been brought in as a co-founder and product designer for Hunch.

To start with, you might want to explore the tool.  Then learn more about how Hunch works by taking their tour.  The site says, “Hunch chooses questions intelligently and adapts them depending on how you answer.  Topics get smarter as more people train them.  So new topics may start out not so smart, but they’ll get smarter over time.”  Users contribute to Hunch in various ways:

• Don’t like the questions that Hunch asked you? Submit a different question.
• Don’t see the result you wanted on Hunch? Propose a better result.
• Looking to make a decision that isn’t on Hunch? Add a new topic.

The more you use it, the more questions you answer, the better the tool should work for you.  I tried it out by shopping for a new cell phone.  By answering just a few questions ranging from preferred price point to desired features, I was then given several matching choices I might like.  I found them reasonable, but I would also regard them as options to explore — along with some from further research.

I think it will be interesting to see how this tool develops over time as more users contribute to the knowledge base, and of course, any individual wanting guidance would do well to set up an account and spend some time on the site answering questions.

It’s everywhere now — Microsoft’s recently announced replacement for Live Search, called bing, to keep things short and simple.  See what a search for “bing” on bing looks like to the right.

Microsoft says bing is a “search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.”  It leads you to:

• Images
• Videos
• Shopping
• News
• Maps
• Travel

You can find out more about bing from Microsoft here. They claim bing overcomes current search engine deficiencies in 3 major areas by:

• Delivering great search results and one-click access to relevant information
• Creating a more organized search experience
• Simplifying tasks and providing tools that enable insight about key decisions

Microsoft also “found that 66 percent of consumers are more focused on using the Internet to get things done, rather than to simply find information.  So with bing they created more than an Internet search engine.  “Instead, we created what is essentially an Internet decision engine that will help you navigate through the rampant excess of information and find the shortest distance to an informed decision.”

Get an outsider’s view of of the product from the Boston Globe.

They say that Microsoft has made serious improvements over Live Search, although not enough to catch up with Google.  “But the new product is good enough to make the Google-Microsoft contest truly interesting.”

And just open today - Bing Travel, which TechCrunch notes is one of the verticals Microsoft is focusing much of its attention on with the new “decision engine” as it sets out to take market share from Google and Yahoo Search.  Bing Travel combines a lot of the airfare and hotel reservation tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with news and other editorial content from MSN Travel.

Customers will be able to take advantage of tools and features like Price Predictor (designed to forecast how airfare prices are going to evolve), Rate Indicator (set up to highlight the best hotel deals), but also Travel Deals, Comparison Flight & Hotel Search, and Fare Alerts.

As shown in the image to the left, you can easily add bing to your list of search engines to select when using Firefox.