The 10 Most Important Social and Digital Media Developments of 2009 - Page 2

5. Miley Cyrus off Twitter? Oh no!

When the Disney star deleted her Twitter account in October, leaving more than 2 million followers in the lurch, it was big news. A seminal moment in the pantheon of social media developments over the past year? Perhaps not. But by god, people were upset. One fan threatened to kill his cat if she didn't come back to Twitter. Miley made a rap video ("Good Bye Twitter") explaining her decision:

"Everything that I type, and everything that I do All those lame gossip sites take it and they make it news I want my private life private ..."

Cyrus is hardly the only celebrity to call off the love affair with Twitter, but hers was certainly the highest-profile breakup. It lands on this list because 2009 introduced much of the world to a new method of keeping tabs on people's favorite celebrities, or at least their ghost-tweeting assistants. For many, it became an all-access affair, where Reese Witherspoon shopping for produce or Ashton Kutcher standing in line at a coffee shop became a newsworthy event (and fertile ground for parody). It was big news when Oprah Winfrey set up a Twitter account, and then gauchely posted her maiden tweet in call caps. Kutcher built a buzz for himself when he challenged CNN to a race to 1 million followers. Professional athletes have been slapped with fines for tweeting during games. During the Wimbledon tennis tournament, announcers on ESPN 2 and NBC (Mary Carillo especially) contorted into unnatural positions to work Twitter references into their coverage, routinely asking players about their Twitter usage in post-match interviews. That wave of celebrity Twitter followers may well have crested in 2009, but let it not be forgotten that, for a time, it was a phenomenon, however unseemly.

4. Social media's woes: security and privacy

For all of the excitement and surging popularity that have attended sites like Twitter and Facebook in 2009, the social Web has become a favorite target of hackers and malware purveyors. Some do it for fun and publicity, others with an eye toward identity theft or other nefarious exploits. Whatever the motive, attacks on social sites were a recurring theme throughout the year that doesn't show any signs of abating as we head into 2010. Partly because the sites are so popular, and partly because we trust them with a lot of our personal information, when they get hacked, it's big news. And an image problem, particularly if they have serious hopes for making inroads in the business community.

Then there's privacy, which is a big one for Facebook. This year has brought intense scrutiny from some regulators and privacy advocates, as well as its boisterous community of users. Facebook has responded with a series of updates aimed to clarify and simplify its privacy practices. The latest, rolled out earlier this month, was billed as the most comprehensive effort to improve the site's privacy policy -- and make people aware of it -- in the young company's history. Its reward? A complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission asking regulators to intervene with legal action against the site.

3. Twittering Iran

In June, when Iranian authorities cracked down on protesters following the disputed presidential election, Twitter won itself a new legitimacy as news organizations were expelled from the country and the micro-blogging service became a prolific source of information about what was happening in the streets. The romantic idea that the so-called "Twitter Revolution" -- the notion that Twitter was the glue holding together a ragtag resistance movement trying to cast off the shackles of a repressive regime, was, well a little overhyped.

There was no Twitter Revolution, and it is true that the vast majority of the online chatter about Iran on the site in those chaotic days in June was contributed by people writing from other countries. But there was enough real information coming out of Iran at a time when foreign correspondents were filing their dispatches from neighboring countries that the State Department prevailed on Twitter executives to delay a scheduled maintenance outage to keep a line of communication open with the people in Tehran. We saw something similar happen in November 2008 with the frantic Twitter posts during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Less than two months later, a jet landed on the Hudson River, with pictures and short messages describing the incident bouncing all over Twitter well before the mainstream news outlets were on the scene. On the occasion of the Iranian protests, the incident that more than any other has established Twitter as something bigger than a novelty, the Onion said it best, as it usually does, when it ran the headline: "Twitter Creator on Iran: 'I Never Intended for Twitter to Be Useful.'"

2. The race to real-time

As the year unfolded, the online vanguard assumed a growing sense of urgency about information. It became about immediacy, real-time everything: news, social exchanges, status updates. Certainly Twitter, by its design and popularity, had a lot to do with this. Its surging base of users seemed to prove that there was a demand for delivering information in seconds to an online populace for whom e-mail seemed a relic of a bygone era.

Keen to meet that demand, the biggest companies on the Web have been revamping their online offerings with a more real-time feel. It began in March, when Facebook unveiled a redesign that gave prominent placement to a real-time status update feature that looked very similar to what Twitter offers. Several site tweaks later, Facebook ends the year as a direct competitor to the micro-blogging upstart. Couple that with the recent deals Twitter has signed with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to incorporate real-time updates in those companies' search results, and it seems clear that a great many well-paid Internet executives have decided that the real-time Web is the way of the future.

1. What is to be done about video?

The TV industry continued to slowly warm to the free, on-demand ethos of the Web while struggling to preserve a business model that came under severe strain in 2009. One notable development came in June, when Time Warner (NYSE: TWC) and Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) began nationwide trials of a program they're calling TV Everywhere, offering paying subscribers the option to watch premium content on the Web. Much to the consternation of advocacy groups who warn against erecting walled gardens on the Web, trials of the program have expanded to new content and distribution providers.

But 2009 also saw moves by Hulu, acting under pressure from joint owners NBC Universal (now in agreement to be taken over by Comcast) and News Corp., to pull content from sites and services like TV.com and Boxee, a fine reminder that this lurching transition is happening in fits and starts. Then News Corp. executives, in their push to revitalize the paid-content business model, began hinting that Hulu could become a pay site, and are currently locked in negotiations with Time Warner Cable in an effort to extract a sweeter distribution deal, a dispute that could, in a worst case scenario, mean that Fox stations are pulled from the cable operator's lineup. So the AP caps off the year with a dark story warning that the model of free, strictly ad-supported TV under the generally understood distribution arrangements could be ending.