After much deliberation, our expert panelists have made their selections. We’ve tallied the results, sprinkled some magic dust about, and are now ready to announce the list of finalists for the 2009 Rails Rumble championship. Woo!

We were originally going to select only 15 applications to go through to the final round, but the entries this year were simply unbelievable; a real testament to what can be done in a tiny amount of time with some sick talented designers / developer pairings, ample caffeine, and a modern set of agile tools like Ruby and Rails. It took a lot of work just to narrow it down to the list of 22 that you see here (in no particular order).

• Daily Stamp by Just Ryan
• How’s My Code? by CoworkingMVD
• Minutes by Team DUMBO
• Pockets by Winners
• Twixperts by Twixperts
• hi.im by Koombea
• ZenVDN by Zencoder
• hurl by 201
• AlertMe.tv by couch potato
• Hot Spots by Heavyweight rockstars
• omnominator by omNOMinators
• Diversion by The Catacrockers
• Bartender Cocktail Recipies by acts_as_ninjas
• Last Percent by Rawnet
• Tablesurfing by Gorillaminds
• LAZEROIDS! by 734m
• Lowdown by Microbrew Certified Partners
• loanit.to by Great Lakes Geeks
• PeepNote by Agile Nomads
• Heart On by Van Damme
• Quippopotamus by Onehub
• Let’s Wadus by Monsters of Ruby

Just because an entry isn’t in this list doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve to be. In fact, a couple of my personal favorite applications didn’t make the final list, which is a bummer (such as How I Really Feel, Smacksale, Rakugoka and a.ppend.to whom I really hope continue to work on their apps), but so it goes! The contest experts have spoken, and our final list is, I think, more impressive than ever before. It’s going to be a real difficult task to decide which of these applications takes home all the loot this year.

And that’s exactly why we need your help! In case you haven’t already, we invite you to register for an account, visit the leaderboard at railsrumble.com/entries, and get your vote on (ballots are located on your profile page). You’ll not only be helping us decide which team gets the top spot, but you’ll also be also entering yourself to win one of a number of randomly selected judging prizes. Do it! Now! Voting closes Sunday at midnight UTC.

Finally, teams can now view their final sets of expert panel ratings by looking at their profile just above the comments section. For those of you interested in which apps will be worked on post-rumble along with those that will be migrating your data, check out Kevin Gisi’s AWESOME rumble scores page. If your team didn’t make it through to the final list, you’re now free work on deploying new versions of your apps. Rock on.