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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
Word processing in the browser, shared with a link
Google Docs let students write group projects in the same document at the same time, which felt like magic in 2010. In January it began storing any file type, and in April it gained a rewritten...
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...
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...
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 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 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...
File lockers, 72-minute limits and pirated TV
Megaupload and its video arm Megavideo were among the busiest sites on the internet in 2010, hosting everything from legitimate file transfers to full seasons of pirated television. Free viewers hit...
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...
Auctions giving way to Buy It Now
eBay was still the world's marketplace for used goods and collectibles in 2010, but its auction format was losing ground to fixed-price Buy It Now listings and to Amazon. It owned PayPal, which...
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...
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,...
The forums that cost ten bucks
Something Awful's forums, where an account cost $9.95, were one of the most influential communities on the 2010 internet. Goons popularised Let's Play videos, ran early Minecraft servers and produced...
6 Reasons the Listicle Ruled 2010
Cracked.com, the former humour magazine, was at its peak in 2010 with numbered list articles about history, science and pop culture that were funnier and better researched than they had any right to...
Wait 60 seconds, then download
RapidShare was the file locker of the late 2000s: paste a link, wait through a countdown, download one file at a time unless you paid for premium. In 2010 it was still among the most-visited sites on...
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