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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Your personalised homepage of gadgets
iGoogle let you build a homepage of widgets: Gmail, weather, news, a to-do list and thousands of gadgets, with themes that changed with the time of day. In 2010 it was one of the most popular start...
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...
The torrent tracker that would not die
The Pirate Bay was the world's best-known BitTorrent index in 2010, a year after its founders were convicted in Sweden. Its pirate-ship logo, comment threads and "legal threats" page made it a symbol...
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...
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...
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...
Collateral Murder, the war logs and Cablegate
WikiLeaks defined the news in 2010. It published the Collateral Murder helicopter video in April, the Afghan War Diary in July, the Iraq War Logs in October, and began releasing US diplomatic cables...
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 UK and Ireland's teen network, sold for a pittance
Bebo had been the biggest social network among teenagers in the UK and Ireland, and AOL bought it for $850 million in 2008. In June 2010 AOL sold it to Criterion Capital Partners for a reported...
China's biggest social network, built on QQ
Tencent's Qzone, attached to the QQ messenger, was by most measures the largest social network in China in 2010, with hundreds of millions of active users decorating their spaces and playing social...
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...
Scrobble everything you play
Last.fm recorded ("scrobbled") every track you played in iTunes, Winamp or your iPod and turned it into charts, recommendations and neighbours with similar taste. In 2010 it was owned by CBS and was...
Any song, on demand, free, and legally doomed
Grooveshark let anyone stream almost any song on demand, free, from a slick Flash interface, because users uploaded the tracks themselves. It was hugely popular in 2010 and already being sued by the...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The movie database, 20 years old
IMDb celebrated its 20th anniversary in October 2010. Owned by Amazon, it was the site everyone opened to settle who was in what, with its yellow-and-black branding, user ratings out of ten, and...
Questions answered by people who were there
Quora opened to the public in June 2010, founded by two former Facebook engineers. Its promise was answers from people with first-hand knowledge, and in 2010 Silicon Valley insiders answered...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
