Year in Review Highlights on the Web

The end of the year always brings with it an outpouring of reviews of the year past. Here’s a few we’ve enjoyed reading:

• The Verge published an excellent year in review, from Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks to the rise of the Netflix Studio.
• Both MailChimp and Spotify created sites that present a fascinating review of the numbers that characterize what these companies, among many, did in 2013. Among the dozens of statistics: 4.5 billion hours streamed by Spotify, and 24.3 million campaigns sent by MailChimp.
• Kickstarter’s year in review provides some really impressive stats—such as 3 million people from 214 countries pledged almost half a billion dollars and successfully funded almost 20,000 projects.
• VentureBeat’s The 10 Best Design Trends of 2013 gives a good summary of what’s happened in the web design arena.
• Developers, check out The Best jQuery Plugins of 2013.
• The Google Zeitgeist 2013 site is entertaining, but I find it even more interesting to drill down into specific areas of interest on Google Trends and look at multi-year trends. For example, this chart shows the popularity of the terms wordpress, drupal, html5, jquery, and responsive for the past 6 years.