It's the last day of 2006, which gives us one final excuse to round up the year's events. Here we present a ridiculously skewed view of the top web events in 2006 through the eyes of Mashable, handpicked from the 1164 posts published this year. The list inexplicably becomes more action-packed as the year progresses - did more happen towards the end of 2006, or did we just become more obsessed with social sites? Also note that insulting comments are not only accepted on this post - they're required by law, and rewarded with a $500 prize. Any mistakes or omissions below have been made on purpose to make your job easier. And yes, we used the phrase "Web 2.0" just to annoy you...
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January 9th: Yahoo Acquires Webjay, a playlist community.
January 21st: AIMspace, AOL's MySpace rival, comes on the scene. Apart from the integration with AIM 6.0, we haven't heard much about it over the course of the year.
January 26th: Yahoo Buying Digg? This was a fun rumor - alas, it was untrue.
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February 15th: Stickam launches.
February 22nd: Google releases Google Pages, one in a series of seemingly pointless new products.
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March 2nd: Newsvine launches.
March 9th: Google Buys Writely. Terrible post from Mashable, but a significant step for Google in hindsight. Why did they have to rename it Google Docs and Spreadsheets?
March 14th: Amazon S3, a storage service for startups, generates some buzz.
March 30th: Cyworld US launches. Almost.
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April 12th: Google Calendar turns out to be a strong offering, in contrast to lots of weak products from Google this year.
April 19th: Feeding the MySpace Beast - Mashable says that "MySpace codes" and "widgets" are the best route to viral growth. Insight, or lucky guess?
April 24th: Plum.com, yet another social bookmarking site. I said they were undifferentiated, and we haven't heard anything about them since - they seem to be hanging on in there, though, since the site is still online.
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May 7th: First mention of Bebo. This site has seen massive growth this year.
May 9th: MySpace IM.
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June 6th: Google Spreadsheets.
June 15th: Mashable on the launch of Netscape.com: "I think it could do nicely". WRONG!
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July 11th: MySpace is America's number 1 site, says Hitwise. Yahoo isn't happy. A similar problem would arise with ComScore's data in December.
July 26th: "YouTube is Not For Sale", says Chad Hurley. They would sell to Google 3 months later.
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August 2nd: Windows Live Spaces launches - even though it's one of the world's biggest blogging platforms, it rarely attracts attention from the tech community.
August 9th: MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts. Forever Geek later calls out Mashable for a lack of skepticism about this number. Fair point.
August 15th: Facebook API allows developers to build their own applications around Facebook accounts.
August 22nd: Sony Acquires Grouper for $65 million.
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September 5th: Facebook launches new feed. Mashable entry reads: "I suspect these new additions might also be a miscalculation". Understatement of the year...users hate the feature. The first of many negative Facebook stories.
September 6th: Rojo acquired by SixApart. Start of the downturn in the feedreader market: others would fail to find an exit.
September 25th: Wallop launches. The Mashable review was only slightly negative, but frankly we just couldn't see it being a success.
September 29th: Mark Cuban says that "only a moron would buy YouTube". Mashable says: "the fact is that it pays to be skeptical: even if YouTube is bought for a billion, the skeptics can maintain that the buyer was a fool. If they then go on to make billions more through ad deals, you can say that the advertisers are morons, too". A few weeks later, Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion, and Cuban insists that Google is a moron for the rest of the year.
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October 2nd: MySpace Blocks Stickam. One of many external developers blocked by MySpace over the course of the year.
October 9th: Google Buys YouTube. Massive price tag of $1.65 billion.
October 17th: Universal Sues Grouper and Bolt.
October 26th: Vox launches the most impressive hosted blogging platform yet.
October 31st: Google Acquires JotSpot.
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November 1st: UTube Sues YouTube - the Universal Tubing company is being overwhelmed with traffic. Later, they decide to cash in on that traffic by putting a sponsored search box on UTube.com.
November 6th: YouTube is Time's Invention of the Year - later, YouTube provides the inspiration for Time's Person of the Year: You.
November 16th: Yahoo Buys Bix.com, an online contests site.
November 17th: Universal Music Sues MySpace. Huge news that makes commentators more cautious about the video sharing hype.
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December 1st: MySpace-Google deal goes live; Google logo appears prominently on MySpace.
December 7th: YouTube Mobile goes live, plus live chatrooms and a feature that lets users post videos from webcams instantly.
December 13th: StumbleVideo launches - a video version of StumbleUpon.