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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with 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...
Press the button, see a random great page
StumbleUpon's toolbar button sent you to a random web page matched to your interests, and its thumbs-up votes could send millions of visitors to an obscure site. Newly independent from eBay again, it...
Square photos, filters, iPhone only
Instagram launched on 6 October 2010 as an iPhone-only app for square photos with retro filters and reached a million users by December. Its filters, such as X-Pro II, Lomo-fi and Earlybird, made...
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...
Two billion views a day, 360p by default
YouTube celebrated its fifth birthday in May 2010 by announcing more than two billion views a day. Users uploaded 24 hours of video every minute in March and 35 hours a minute by November. The player...
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...
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...
Books, Kindle, and a store that sold everything
Amazon in 2010 was the everything store with a cluttered tan-and-orange homepage, two-day shipping for $79-a-year Prime members, and a Kindle business so successful that the company said Kindle books...
One deal a day, and a $6 billion offer refused
Groupon emailed one local deal a day, half-price yoga classes or restaurant vouchers, that only activated if enough people bought in. It was called the fastest-growing company in web history in 2010,...
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...
Social news, and the redesign that broke it
Digg let users "digg" stories onto a front page that could crash a small website with traffic. In August 2010, Digg version 4 removed favourite features, let publishers auto-submit content, and...
Random strangers, webcam to webcam
Chatroulette paired you with a random stranger over webcam and let either of you hit Next. Built by 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy in late 2009, it exploded in February and March 2010, inspired piano...
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...
Ask me anything, anonymously
Formspring launched in late 2009 and spread through high schools in 2010: a page where anyone could ask you questions, often anonymously, and you answered in public. It grew to millions of users...
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...
The MP3 blog aggregator
Hype Machine tracked hundreds of MP3 blogs and let you stream whatever they had just posted, with a Popular chart that could break a band. In 2010 it was the front page of the music-blog era,...
Waveforms and timed comments
SoundCloud, founded in Berlin in 2007, was becoming the place for producers and DJs to share tracks in 2010. Its orange waveform player, with comments pinned to moments in a song, was unlike anything...
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...
Every blog you followed, in one inbox
Google Reader was the RSS reader of choice for anyone who followed many blogs, with keyboard shortcuts, folders, and a Share button that made it a small social network of its own. In 2010 it was at...
LOLcats as a media company
I Can Has Cheezburger turned LOLcats into a business, and by 2010 the Cheezburger Network ran dozens of sites, including FAIL Blog and Memebase, publishing user-submitted image macros to millions of...
Anonymous drunk texts, sorted by area code
Texts From Last Night posted anonymous text messages submitted by readers, tagged only with an area code, and became a 2009-2010 phenomenon with a book deal and a TV option. Alongside FMyLife, it was...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Ten billion songs sold, and the Beatles arrive
The iTunes Store was the centre of legal digital music in 2010: it passed ten billion songs sold in February, iTunes 10 arrived in September with the ill-fated Ping social network, and in November...
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...
