A collection of Favorite startups and products for 2009 by Michael Arrington, it also shows a list from previous years…

From TechCrunch

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…

1. 800-Free-411 – 1-800-FREE411 was created to provide callers with a free alternative to the skyrocketing rates being charged by phone companies for directory assistance (411).
2. Animoto – Animoto generates custom, professional-looking slideshows from user-uploaded music and photos. Their “patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design” drives the web app. They say the Cinematic A.I. analyzes users’ photos and music like an actual director and editor. For instance, to analyze music the genre, song structure, energy, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocals are all taken into consideration.
3. 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.
4. Digg - Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see.
5. Facebook – On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the student body at Harvard had signed up. Other schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
6. FriendFeed – FriendFeed is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.
   Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track …
7. Gmail – Gmail is the Google approach to email and chat. Practically unlimited free online storage allows you to collect all your messages, and Gmail’s simple but very smart interface lets you find them precisely and see them in context without effort. POP and powerful IMAP access bring Gmail to any email program or device.Gmail puts contextual advertising next to the emails you read.
8. Google Reader – Google Reader is an online RSS feed reader.
9. Hulu – Hulu is NBC Universal and News Corporation’s online video joint venture. The site focuses exclusively on professional content and does not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. The site raised $100 million in financing from Providence Equity Partners.
10. MySpace Music – MySpace Music is a joint music venture, with equity stakes from major labels, that allows users to stream music on demand, create playlists, and add widget music players to their profiles. The streaming will be advertising supported – at first via display ads (like Imeem), and later via in-stream audio ads. DRM-free downloads will also be available, either advertising supported or on a pay basis like Amazon’s Music Store.
11. Pandora – Born out of a love for music with 99% of its employees at one time or another working as musicians, Pandora is truly a company wholly dedicated to music. With a database of more than 600 thousand songs, each digitally annotated with musical characteristics from a list of 400, the company generates personalized streaming radio for your computer, mobile phone or home entertainment system.
12. Scribd – Scribd is a social document sharing site that borrowed a lot of the basic design principles from YouTube.
13. Docstoc – Docstoc is the premier online community to find and share professional documents. Docstoc provides the platform for users and businesses to upload and share their documents with all the world, and serves as a vast repository of documents in variety of categories including legal, business, financial, technology, educational, and creative. All documents on docstoc can be easily searched, previewed and downloaded for free.
14. Skype – Skype is a peer-to-peer Internet telephony service that is free for Skype-to-Skype calls. The service also allows Skype users to call mobiles and landlines, and vice-versa. Skype has special charge plans for non-Skype-to-Skype calls. Skype is expanding from its traditional computer-based calls to mobile applications. Skype was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who were also the founders of the file sharing application Kazaa and the peer-to-peer television application Joost. Skype is different than other VoIP services in that it uses a peer-to-peer model instead of a server-client model.
15. TechMeme – the site that is considered by many as the blogosphere’s daily tech newspaper was later renamed Techmeme (pronounced “tech-meam”). Stories often hit Techmeme days before the New York Times and other newspapers cover them.
16. TripIt – TripIt is an intelligent travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans so that their trips go more smoothly. Travelers simply forward their purchase confirmation emails to TripIt and TripIt automatically creates…
17. Twitter -  Twitter allows users to post text updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, Twitter’s website and third party applications. Users have their own profile page that displays their latest updates. In addition, users can become “friends” with one another, or simply be a “follower.” Other than reading another person’s profile page, a user can also receive others’ updates through text messages, RSS or third party applications.
18. WordPress – WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog, developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg.

The latest release of WordPress is version 2.6.2, released on 08 September 2008. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.

19. YouTube – Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the world’s most popular online video community, allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and e-mail.

20. Zoho – Zoho offers Office Suite, which includes Writer, Projects, Sheet, CRM, Show, Creator, Wiki, Planner, Suite, Notebook, Chat, Meeting and Mail. All products are offered through dynamic webpages that allow for rich online applications.

Source: TechCrucnh