HootSuite lets a multi-person social media team manage tweets in a web based app that doesnt need to be downloaded (I'm a user). This can actually be a real business, unlike, oh, 90% of the twitter apps out there. Just because most of them are toys doesnt mean they all are.

HootSuite is one of only 3 listed that I'd heard of (HootSuite, FreshBooks, NowPublic), and I'd heard of it in a business context where people would pay -- a technical team at a Major Company sharing responsibility for a support Twitter account. So the dismissiveness is unwarranted.

they may be fine as a stand alone business, but not as a top 10 business for an entire country

The list is supposed to be the top 20 web 2.0 businesses, not all businesses or even all tech businesses.

and would you say that those are the 20 top web 2.0 businesses for the entire country? I just don't believe that.

I'm not sure, I don't really follow web 2.0 stuff. The list does seem a bit West-coast biased though. I can think of other Canadian tech and software companies (Idée, for example) that are more interesting to me than HootSuite, but it's not my list.