It feels like just yesterday I was writing the yearly review for 2010, but believe it or not, another year has passed again. It’s time to recall what 2011 brought to WOT.

Key numbers & Service development

We started the year with 16 million downloads. 20 million downloads was reached in May, and now, right this moment, the exact number is 29,520,920 (which keeps growing fast, so check the counter on our front page for the exact number). Firefox still remains the most popular add-on among WOT users, but Google Chrome’s catching up fast and helped make the 3rd of November a day that will be remembered for the daily download record of all times - 80,000 downloads in just one day! (NB: We broke the record several days in a row and therefore the date and the number is different on the linked blog post.) We will break that soon again so let’s not get too exited… ;)

To serve our users the best possible way it’s important to make sure they see the WOT donuts where they need them. 2011 brought relief to those who like to network safely online: WOT reputation icons are now also visible on social networking sites Facebook, its Russian equivalent Vkontakte, on Twitter, and on several other popular sites. They are also shown for shortened URLs. The add-on’s now available in 15 languages, the newest being Korean – Thanks to our lovely intern Kaye who was with us for the first half of the year.

Business & Legal matters

Businesswise, 2011 was fruitful. In May, Facebook started using WOT to warn its users of potentially untrustworthy links. It was a great honor to us to be one of Facebook’s first security partners. In August, Russia’s leading free email service Mail.ru also started using WOT’s reputation database to protect its users. These reference cases give strong evidence that we’re going to the right direction.

Despite the promising numbers and achievements, the year wasn’t all sunshine and butterflies. In February, WOT was sued in Florida by ten Internet companies that demanded WOT to remove ratings and comments for their sites. As we expected, the claims were baseless and the judge dismissed the case with prejudice. The freedom of speech won.

What will 2012 bring?

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

This is a good starting point for 2012, and we look forward to new challenges and opportunities it will bring. Big things are coming up, and we'll let you know more when the time comes. Thank you all for the great year 2011, and we hope you will stay with us for many years to come! Happy New Year 2012!

Only a week ago we were happy about winning the lawsuit in Florida, and praised the courts in the US for favoring the freedom of speech. And now comes the SOPA.

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives in October, and has awakened heated debate in the press since. The objective of the bill is to weed out piracy on the web, but the way it does it, is more than questionable. This is how Wikipedia explains it:

The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.

In practice, if the SOPA gets passed, any website operator could get blocked from ad revenue, search traffic, and web traffic in the US, if it was found to enable or facilitate copyright infringement. It doesn’t take much to do that: a few infringing links could get the whole site blocked.

Sites hosting user-generated content, such as WOT, would be at a great risk. SOPA would force them to police their users’ behavior and filter content, a task that in many cases is impossible. For example reddit, the popular social news site, has stated that SOPA would mean its end.

Even worse than losing reddit and many other wonderful sites, is what SOPA could do to the whole online ecosystem: fewer startups entering due to the legal risks, and censorship becoming the new standard for the whole web. Is that the path we want to take?

Dear community members in the US. Please contact your representatives, and ask them to oppose the SOPA. Piracy is to be fought against, but this is not the way.

Check this infographic for more information of the effects of SOPA.

In February, we told you about the lawsuit filed against WOT in Florida. Ten internet companies accused WOT of defamation, violating rights, conspiracy and manipulating algorithms, among other claims, and demanded WOT to remove ratings and comments related to them. Now, almost a year later, we finally have good news: The court of justice granted the motion to dismiss with prejudice!

Obviously, we all are very relieved of the judge’s decision, although we’re not surprised. “The court’s decision is a very important precedent for WOT, although we always knew that the case was baseless. The decision shows clearly that courts in the United States favor freedom of speech.” says CEO Vesa Perälä.

Read the whole story in our press release that also explains the colorful changes of the case.

Thank you all for your support!

Good news for users of Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook: WOT reputation icons help you now find trustworthy links on Vkontakte too!

Vkontakte is a social networking service that has over 100 million users in Russia and other Russian speaking countries. Now, with the WOT integration, color-coded reputation icons are shown after each external link in Vkontakte, telling which sites are trusted by millions of users.

Since WOT’s second biggest user group comes from Russia, we are very happy to provide this extra safety feature to our Vkontakte users!

Хорошие новости для пользователей сети ВКонтакте: WOT теперь отмечает ссылки значками с репутацией и в этой социальной сети тоже!

Это значит, что после каждой ссылки на внешний сайт показывается небольшой значок, который помогает вам понять, доверяют ли этому сайту миллионы пользователей WOT.

Российская группа пользователей WOT является второй крупнейшей, поэтому мы очень рады предоставить эту дополнительную возможность нашим пользователям сети ВКонтакте.