Sina Weibo
China's microblog, one year old
Launched in August 2009 after Twitter was blocked in China, Sina Weibo grew rapidly through 2010, mixing 140-character posts (which fit far more meaning in Chinese) with images, comments and...
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China's microblog, one year old
Launched in August 2009 after Twitter was blocked in China, Sina Weibo grew rapidly through 2010, mixing 140-character posts (which fit far more meaning in Chinese) with images, comments and...
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...
Anonymous, /b/, and the meme factory
4chan's anonymous image boards, especially /b/, generated much of the internet's meme vocabulary in 2010 and gave rise to Anonymous, which attacked PayPal and Visa in December in support of...
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...
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...
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...
Dial-up subscribers, AIM, and a content empire in the making
AOL was spun off from Time Warner in December 2009 and spent 2010 remaking itself as a content company: it bought TechCrunch in September, ran Engadget, and still collected subscription fees from...
The largest online art community
DeviantArt was ten years old in 2010 and the home of fan art, digital painting, photography and Photoshop brushes, with well over ten million members. Its green pages, "deviation" uploads and llama...
The blog that bought a lost iPhone prototype
Gizmodo, Gawker Media's gadget blog, published the biggest tech story of 2010 on 19 April: photos and a teardown of a lost iPhone 4 prototype bought from someone who found it in a bar. Police raided...
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...
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...
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