Techcrunch has recently awarded the winners of the annual Crunchies. Techcrunch is among the top technology blogs and competitions like these not only show the current trends on the web but also give the newcomers much needed publicity.

The winners were determined by online voting – one vote per IP address per day. I don’t know about this but I think there should be a team of professionals whose votes had more weight making the online voting only a percentage of the final tally.

Facebook won in the Best Overall Startup category. No surprises because it is still the leading social network. Twitter came in at second with its many improvements and explosive growth in 2009.

The Best New Product of 2009 is Bing, the search engine of Microsoft. Its launch (or relaunch) last year was big news, being a Microsoft product and all. And the name Bing? It got me wondering why they changed the name from the already recognized Live brand.

Other categories saw popular nominees taking the win.The people awards were executives from other nominees. The most interesting category, at least for me was the Best Time Sink application.

Google and Microsoft products were abundant as well as Facebook-related ones. Farmville won the Best Social App award and Zynga was a finalist in the Best Overall Startup. Mobile applications also dominated some of the categories.

I haven’t heard/seen/read about some of the nominees so I’m glad these new applications were given the spotlight.

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