As the year 2010 is coming to an end, it’s time to take a little break and look back. 2010 was an important year of growth and improvement for Web of Trust. What will we remember this year for?
Doubling downloads
We started 2010 with 8 million downloads. The milestone of 10 million downloads was celebrated at the end of March and the massive 16 million was reached in December, thus downloads were doubled during 2010!
2010 proved that WOT suits organizational needs also. In Austria, an excellent example of WOT for governmental use was shown as the Upper Austrian Chamber of Labor started offering WOT for citizens to avoid Internet scam sites. In the US, Fargo Public Schools with its 10,200 students and 1,000 teachers adapted WOT for academia.
Expanding coverage
WOT’s goal has always been to be available to as many Internet users as possible. However, at the beginning of 2010, WOT was available only for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, as Opera and Safari didn’t allow browser extensions.
Safari started supporting extensions in version 5. After a challenging development process, WOT was launched for Safari in July 2010.
Opera announced its new extension feature, and WOT was among the first ones invited to participate. In December, the good news were released: WOT was lauched for Opera 11.
Search engines DuckDuckGo and Qrobe, specialized in safe searching, took the initiative and started using WOT API to protect their users and provide them an enhanced searching experience.
Boosting awareness
|
Before using WOT, one has to know about it first. Bloggers, journalists and individual users play a key role in building awareness required for new downloads. While a short mention in a mainstream media may have a huge impact in daily downloads, also each recommendation by individual users counts. For example, the opinion leaders on the right have boosted awareness about WOT in 2010. Click the logos to read what they’ve said. In addition to them, hundreds of other journalist, bloggers and specialists have spread the word about WOT to their followers. Sincere thanks to you all who have facilitated and supported building awareness about WOT in 2010! |
|
Looking forward to the future
The year ended with the President of Finland awarding WOT with the prestigious InnoFinland prize in recognition of our remarkable innovation. This, in addition to the number of downloads doubled from 2009 and the WOT add-on available for all major browsers in the world, form a good starting point for 2011! We are looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that the New Year may bring!
Happy New Year everyone!