The Web Masters

If one thing hurts his chances for success, it will be his East Coast background. Many blogs out of Silicon Valley already wonder whether Genachowski is really a digital whiz kid or just another Washington wonk. "Genachowski is a lawyer who I'm sure can grasp net neutrality," writes Paul Boutin of Valleywag.com "But if this turns out to be Obama's idea of a technologist, I'm going home to cling bitterly to my guns and religion."

Evan Williams
Twitter
It's easy for skeptics to dismiss Williams and his San Francisco startup. Twitter has no revenues, despite sucking in $20 million in investors' cash since 2006, and no clear path to profitability. Its key service is "micro-blogging," an easy, efficient way to send short status updates to friends and followers via a text message, IM, e-mail or Web site—an idea that has been fingered as a symptom of cultural decline. What can you possibly say in 140 characters or less, the critics argue, and do your friends really care if you just ate pancakes?

But it's not for nothing that Williams and Twitter have become the darling of Silicon Valley. Twitter is a favored way to share thoughts, observations and snippets of information, and even has celebrity endorsements—Shaquille O'Neal signed up in 2008. (Follow him at http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ.) More importantly, it's become, in the words of investor Roger Ehrenberg, an "enabling platform," a way for people to easily and quickly rally around a common interest or topic. This is true even for sudden and unpredictable events. After the Chengdu earthquake in May, the writer and tech enthusiast Robert Scoble used Twitter to organize news coming out of China, and claims to have shared on-the-scene reports an hour before CNN even started talking about the disaster.

Because Williams decided early on to keep Twitter open and let outside programmers develop applications based on it, there's been a torrent of Twitter-related creativity. StockTwits, one of Ehrenberg's investments, lets finance fanatics hear what other traders think about a particular company, investment idea, or stock market move. And, just as during the Chengdu earthquake, the information flows in real time—an obvious benefit when you're trying to figure out where the Dow is headed.

You can expect more narrowly focused add-ons like StockTwits in 2009, which will transform the way enthusiasts share information about their passions. Williams's challenge for the year will be to figure out a way to channel all this enthusiasm into a business model. He reportedly turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook earlier this year—a bold move indicating he's got big plans for the 31-person company. He's hinted that advertising won't be the way forward, saying he wants revenues to be "product-based," whatever that means. (One guess is that he'll start selling a secure, private version of the service to companies.) No matter what he decides, it had better be an idea simple enough to convey in 140 characters or less.

Jason Kilar
Hulu
Media companies have hardly embraced placing their video and audio content on the Internet. The relationship has mostly been fought out in the courts—think Napster, Grokster and, most recently, Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for "massive intentional copyright infringement" that is still making its way through the courts.

Enter Kilar, the young chief executive of Hulu.com. Hulu started life as a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. Top executives at both companies were frustrated by the swiftly growing world of online video, which (illegally) helped itself to their shows and movies. They wanted to capitalize on the stampede toward Web-based video without falling under its hooves. Kilar, a top executive at Amazon.com, joined the startup in June 2007. He quickly assembled an engineering team and, after just nine months, unveiled Hulu to the public.