Year End Reading for 2008

Its that time of the year - blogs looking back and others predicting whats to come in the year ahead. Some of these are certainly interesting and some thought provoking. I thought I'd share a few that caught my eyes during the past few days.

Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008 - This is one amongst many other top 10 posts from ReadWriteWeb. The #1 spot as you might expect is taken up with the iPhone and all the expected ones such as Facebook and Amazon Web Services were on there, including Live Mesh. While Adobe AIR occupied the #3 spot (I thought it would have been Flex), Silverlight was missing from the roundup. While I might be a bit biased, I think it will be interesting to see what might happen in 2009. The other interesting one for me was Twitter in the #4 spot - I've been on Twitter for a while, but only started actually posting, or tweeting I should say (lets see how that pans out over the next year). Seeing some of the recent discussions around deriving authority ranking, its certainly got the potential for an interesting platform in the making.

Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008 - The #1 on this list was again from Apple, the App Store - to me it seems just as much an interesting platform as much as a consumer phenomenon - I think its only natural for a platform to include marketplace characteristics as an integral feature.

ReadWriteWeb has other interesting Top 10 lists including real-world web apps, semantic web products and others if you're interested.

Of course the prediction blog posts have also started appearing, and its fun to check them out. Again ReadWriteWeb has a whole set online. One I thought was interesting was about the online version of Office vs. Google Docs. I blogged about the Office sneak peek at PDC, and sharing those as a large project success story for Script#. Another prediction touched on some new user interface developments blowing us all... I can't wait to see. I think the Ajax and RIA evolution have brought UX to center-stage and a new found appreciation for design both in terms of aesthetics and functionality.

On a non-technical front, the mainstream news sites (now online) aren't to be left behind. New York Times has its Year in Pictures up as does Time and a three part series titled The Big Picture.

I love photography, and the National Geographic has some great photos that are both interesting, and motivational ... one can only aspire to have something published on there... some day! Their Photo of the Day archive has photos from all through the year and some are quite eye-catching indeed.

All of these photo sites could really benefit from Silverlight's Deep Zoom! They could also benefit from an API that lets people remix the content...

What did folks read recently that was interesting? Any good content you'd recommend?