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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Reblogs, GIFs and the dark blue dashboard
Tumblr grew explosively in 2010. Its dashboard, a dark blue page of posts from the blogs you followed, made reblogging and animated GIFs the currency of a new creative culture, from fandoms to...
Ten blue links, and results that appeared as you typed
Google in 2010 was a white page with a colourful logo, one box and ten blue links. The year began with Google refusing to keep censoring results in China, added a left-hand panel of search tools in...
Plain blue links that killed newspaper classifieds
Craigslist looked exactly like it had in the 1990s: a list of blue links on a white page, city by city, with apartments, jobs, used furniture and missed connections. In September 2010, under pressure...
The professional network before it became a feed
LinkedIn in 2010 was the online résumé: profiles, connection requests from people you met once, and recruiters' InMail. It reported passing 90 million members around the end of the year and prepared...
The world's biggest webmail, redesigned
Hotmail, by then branded Windows Live Hotmail, had hundreds of millions of accounts in 2010, many of them the first email address people ever created. A mid-2010 update added Sweep, Office Web Apps...
Conversations, labels, and 7 GB of storage
Gmail had left beta in 2009 and by 2010 was the email of choice for anyone under 35, with conversation threading, labels instead of folders and more than 7 GB of free storage. The year brought Google...
140 characters and the Fail Whale
Twitter turned four in 2010 and became the internet's newswire. Users sent about 50 million tweets a day in February and roughly 90 million a day by September, the Library of Congress agreed to...
The fading giant with glitter graphics and a Top 8
By 2010 MySpace had lost its crown to Facebook and was shedding users and staff under News Corp, which had bought it in 2005. In October it relaunched as a "social entertainment" site with a new...
Three and a half million articles and a new default skin
Wikipedia was nine years old in 2010 and by far the largest reference work ever assembled, with the English edition approaching 3.5 million articles. In May the site switched its default look from...
Check in, become the mayor
Foursquare made 2010 the year of the check-in. Users broadcast their location to friends, collected badges, and fought to become the "mayor" of their coffee shop. The app's success pushed Facebook to...
Google's social network that Brazil and India loved
Orkut, Google's 2004 social network, was largely ignored in the United States but was the biggest social network in Brazil and hugely popular in India through 2010. Its "scraps", communities and...
The original social network, thriving in Southeast Asia
Friendster predated MySpace and Facebook, and although it had faded in the West by 2010, it was still one of the most popular sites in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, with a Malaysian owner,...
Talk to strangers
Omegle launched in 2009 as an anonymous text chat with strangers and added video chat in March 2010 as Chatroulette's popularity surged. Its tagline, "Talk to strangers!", captured a moment when...
Russia's Facebook, with a music library
VKontakte (VK) was the dominant social network across Russia and the former Soviet states in 2010. Its interface closely resembled early Facebook, but it let users upload and stream music and video...
Where filmmakers uploaded in HD
Vimeo was the arty alternative to YouTube in 2010: cleaner pages, HD playback, no ads in the player, and a community of designers, animators and indie filmmakers. Its first Vimeo Awards took place in...
Type a band, get a radio station
Pandora's Music Genome Project turned any song or artist into a personalised radio station with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Free listening was capped at 40 hours a month in 2010, the service...
Name your price
Bandcamp gave independent artists a simple page to stream and sell their music, including "name your price" downloads in any format from MP3 to FLAC. By 2010 it was quietly becoming the fairest...
Skype's founders try music streaming in America
Rdio, from Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, launched in the US and Canada in August 2010 as a subscription streaming service with a social feed of what friends were playing. It beat...
Microsoft's one-year-old "decision engine"
Bing had launched in June 2009 with a photographic homepage and a marketing budget that called it a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. In 2010 it took over powering Yahoo's search...
China's search engine, after Google walked away
Baidu was already the dominant search engine in China when Google stopped censoring google.cn in March 2010 and redirected users to Hong Kong. Baidu's share of Chinese searches climbed past three...
Nudges, winks and display names full of lyrics
Still called MSN by almost everyone, Windows Live Messenger was the dominant instant messenger outside the United States in 2010, with hundreds of millions of users. Its 2011 version, released in...
Free calls over the internet, video included
Skype was how families called abroad and how long-distance couples saw each other in 2010. It reported more than 500 million registered users, offered free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls, and...
Social bookmarking, sunset by Yahoo
Delicious (originally del.icio.us) let people save bookmarks with tags and see what everyone else was saving. It had defined social bookmarking since 2003, but in December 2010 a leaked Yahoo slide...
Five billion photos, and the iPhone as top camera
Flickr passed five billion uploaded photos in September 2010 and was the serious photographer's social network: albums called sets, Creative Commons licences, groups for every camera, and Explore's...
Where MySpace and forum images lived
Photobucket hosted the images that people hot-linked into MySpace profiles, forum signatures and eBay listings. In 2010 it was one of the most-visited image hosts in the United States, quietly...
Hosted WordPress, and the software running the blogosphere
WordPress powered a large share of the blogs and news sites of 2010, and WordPress.com offered hosted blogs with themes and stats for free. WordPress 3.0, released in June 2010, merged the multi-site...
A magic folder that synced, 2 GB free
Dropbox gave you a folder that synced across your computers and phone, with 2 GB free and more if you referred friends. In 2010 it was the way students moved essays between the library computer and...
Flash videos, viral clips and content wars
eBaum's World was a 2000s viral-media site that collected funny videos, Flash animations and images, often without credit, which made it notorious among creators. By 2010 it was still busy but...
Free games, and the school-computer favourite
Miniclip was where school computer labs went to play 8 Ball Pool, Club Penguin's ancestors and hundreds of other Flash games. In 2010 it claimed tens of millions of monthly players and was expanding...
Nickelodeon's Flash arcade
Addicting Games, owned by Nickelodeon's parent Viacom, was one of the most-visited casual game sites in 2010, with categories like Shooting, Puzzle and Sports and a front page of ad-supported Flash...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
The social network at 500 million users
In 2010 Facebook was six years old, had just overtaken Google as the most-visited site in the United States on some weekly measures, and passed 500 million users in July. Its blue-and-white pages...
The front page of the internet, before it was
In 2010 Reddit was a spartan, text-heavy site owned by Condé Nast, far smaller than Digg at the start of the year. Digg's disastrous August redesign sent a wave of users to Reddit, and subreddits...
