15 January
Twitter's rapid rise to public prominence was fuelled spectacularly when US Airways flight 1549 bound for Charlotte, North Carolina made an emergency crash landing into the Hudson River. The first reporter on the scene? Twitter user @jkrums who was crossing the river via ferry. His photo was the first to be published and has now received over half a million views.

20 January
Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States. The "web 2.0" style approach to his campaign has become a case study in how to engage with supporters to raise awareness and funding.

21 January
CNN produced an enormous interactive photo stitch of the Inauguration using Microsoft's Photosynth Users were able to upload their photographs of the event and Photosynth managed to stitch them together in an amazing virtual experience.

30 January
David After Dentist was uploaded and became one of the biggest YouTube hits of 2009 with a cool 37 million views.

11 April
Scottish singer Susan Boyle became an instant singing superstar after her rendition of "I dreamed a dream" on British reality TV programme "Britain's Got Talent".  With numerous versions of the rendition spread across YouTube, the total view count extends well into 100 million.

16 April
Ashton Kutcher became the poster-boy of Twitter, being the first person to get to 1 Million followers. He shares his life (and wife) over his very personal tweets. Kutcher now has an astonishing 4,115,408 followers.

17 May
Keyboard Cat became one of the most popular memes of 2009. Up to four thousand related video’s have been created since including an amusing dig at Miss Teen USA : South Carolina

1 June
GM Motors release this video titled ‘Re: Invention’-Which was produced in an effort to change perceptions about the classic but under-performing car giant. The video highlights the inefficiencies and shortcomings of the organisations and explains how the company intends to change its clearly defunct strategy through greener and leaner business practices. A brave move, to be quickly parodied by GM ‘Re : Tardation’

3 June
Microsoft renews their offensive on Google’s search market dominance and launches Bing. Bing has, to date, far outperformed Microsoft’s expectations, securing 9.9% of US Search engine Market share. Notable features of Bing are the real-time results and the ability to save and share searches.

4 June
Quick wit by GM Re : Tardation who release their parody of the GM video a mere 3 days after its release.

8 June
The highly innovative and progressive New York Times employs Jennifer Preston a full time, in house Social Media.

 
25 June
With the shocking and untimely death of Michael Jackson, Twitter became a forum for MJ related messages of sympathy and sorrow for the loss of this icon. Twitter became inundated with MJ related tweets, 30% of all tweets that day were related to him.

6 July
A United Airlines passenger’s prized and beloved guitar is mishandled and subsequently broken by the baggage handlers. The passenger spends nine months trying to claim damages and gets nowhere-in a response to this he makes three videos about the whole exasperating experience. Dave Carroll’s videos caused hell for United Airlines, and generated and fuelled a huge amount of conversation about the inefficiencies of the airline. This example once again demonstrates the power of authenticity, creativity and compelling content to grab attention and send PR executives reeling. To date the videos have generated 6,577,574 views and propelled Carroll’s band to new heights on the country music charts.

17 July
Quirk launch the Harry Potter Tweet where users can cast and receive an array of magical spells through Twitter. This campaign was massively successful and Quirk subsequently won some very pretty awards for it.

29 July
Microsoft and Yahoo Merge in order to take on the search engine market with the previously mentioned Bing. The deal was designed in order to compensate for the weaknesses of both organisations. Microsoft could make Yahoo’s search more sophisticated and Yahoo could boost ad revenue for Microsoft.

31 July
Mozilla’s web browser Firefox reaches the 1000 Million download mark.

10 September
Is Stephen Fry the new Oprah?

 ‘You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman's 'Sum'. If you read it and aren't enchanted I will eat 40 hats’

This Tweet by famous and respected author Stephen Fry caused overnight success for author David Eagleman in the shape of a dramatic increase of 6,000% in sales of his book. This alone must demonstrate the absolute power and influence of twitter.

13 September
Kanye West causes controversy (again) by ruining Taylor Swifts MTV moment. He storms the stage and protests that Beyonce’s video was ‘one of the best videos of all time’. West is subsequently spoken about by everyone and their aunty-including Barack Obama who calls him a ‘Jackass’-which was tame in comparison to some of the other offences that were thrown his way. Once again Twitter breaks the news first-with celeb’s inside the event Tweeting about the incident-such as Katy Perrys tweet- “F-You Kanye, its like you stepped on a kitten.”  In the first hour after the incident 300,000 tweets were generated.

The graph below demonstrates the Kanye-related domination of Twitter. 

30 September
Google ’wave is launched, another ingenious tool from the minds at Google, meant to ‘Communicate and Collaborate in real time’ Not yet completely understood by web users at large. Many explanations are currently circulating around the web-however this has to be the best one. One of the issues with Google Wave the fact that you must receive invitation to use it. Thanks to Rob for our invitations!

15 October
Balloon Boy- After an inordinate amount of news coverage and the closing of Denver Airport for a day-it turned out that Balloon Boy story was all a highly elaborate hoax. The poor boy was hiding in a cardboard box the whole time. The story generated a huge amount of attention online, both during and after the incident. The aftermath of the incident was a large collection of user generated viral images and video’s about the story. Some examples can be found here  

15 October
Kanye becomes involved the Balloon Boy story

9 November
As previously written about here on Gottaquirk by the lovely Emma D, the Evian viral video broke the Guinness World Record for the most watched advert of all time with 45 Million views. The ad cleverly promoted the brands key offering through the digitally animated video- ‘Evian supports your body’s youth” Love it or hate it, this video sure was one of 2009’s success stories.