Microsoft gets its mojo back

Microsoft has enjoyed something of a renaissance this year. The software company is once again leading from the front; Project Natal, its potentially game-changing controller-free, motion-sensing gaming system, was one of the most exciting product demos seen this year. A much-needed overhaul of its mobile operating system has stopped Windows Mobile dropping too far behind Android and the iPhone, while it has refreshed its search offering, with the launch of Bing in the US and UK and real-time search deals with Facebook and Twitter. And with the successful launch of Windows 7, Vista seems like a distant nightmare. CB

Info in an instant

In 2009, it's no longer enough to search for information that was current 30 minutes or an hour ago. Now, Internet junkies look for their news, Tweets and links to be updated in "real-time," just as they are on Twitter.

Search engines bought into this idea in 2009. Microsoft and Google struck deals with Twitter to pipe in or replicate its real-time search function. The micro-blogging site lets authors post short bursts of information, which become searchable the moment someone clicks send.

Facebook grows up

This was the year of the Facebook mom and grandma. Founded in 2004 for college students, the online social network exploded in 2008 and might have been expected to level off this year. Instead, it went global and expanded into new and older demographics.

About 70 percent of Facebook's users now live outside of the site's home base in the United States, according to statistics released by the company.

The site's importance in our lives grew in tandem with these demographic shifts. Facebook now has more than 350 million users -- that's more people than live in the United States and is more than double the 150 million people who were on Facebook at the start of the year. Half of Facebook users log on to the site at least once on any given day; the average Facebook user spends nearly an hour a day on the site.

Books go digital

Sick of lugging hefty books with you on vacation? Portable, electronic readers -- with their easy-on-the-eyes displays and ability to carry hundreds of titles without gaining weight -- started to make inroads on their hardback cousins in 2009.

E-book sales brought in $13.9 million in revenue in the third quarter of last year, according to International Digital Publishing Forum, a trade organization. The same time period this year saw $46.5 million in e-book revenue -- a 235 percent spike.

The Amazon Kindle, originally released in November 2007, found some competition this year with the release of the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble's Nook. Meanwhile, libraries, authors, publishers and Google continued to haggle out the details of a settlement that could give the Internet giant permission to create the world's largest library -- online only.

Smartphone craze

By the end of 2009, having a basic cell phone wasn't good enough anymore. Now the standard is a smartphone -- a mobile phone that also acts as a computer -- and links its users to Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the digital universe.

Despite the economic recession, the smartphone market expanded. It was fueled in part by the popular iPhone but also by an increasingly diverse set of smartphone choices, including the Droid, BlackBerry and Pre. Smartphone sales worldwide for 2009 were up 24 percent compared with 2008, according to Gartner Inc., a research company.

Thanks to these phones, people this year grew accustomed to sending e-mail, uploading photos and videos and posting status messages from anywhere, at almost anytime.