Loading...
Global search
Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Disney's virtual world for kids
Club Penguin was the safe, moderated virtual world where children waddled around as penguins, played mini-games and decorated igloos. Disney had bought it in 2007, and in 2010 it was one of the...
Big in Latin America and Portugal
hi5 was one of the world's largest social networks in the mid-2000s, especially in Latin America, Portugal, Romania and Thailand. In 2010 it was pivoting toward social games and virtual gifts as...
Pixel rooms and furni
Habbo Hotel, the Finnish virtual hotel of isometric pixel rooms, was where teenagers hung out and traded "furni" in 2010. Its Shockwave client, guest rooms and games were a cultural touchstone across...
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...
The browser MMO played in the school library
RuneScape ran in a browser with Java, needed no download, and had millions of players in 2010. Its low-polygon world, skill grinding, Wilderness PvP and player-run economy made it the MMO for anyone...
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...
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...
Communities, moods and friends-only posts
LiveJournal was the blogging community that fandoms, writers and teenagers had used since 1999. Owned by Russian company SUP since 2007, it was in slow decline in the English-speaking world by 2010...
Red envelopes, and a streaming-only plan
In 2010 Netflix was still mostly a DVD-by-mail company, but streaming was taking over: Watch Instantly worked on the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Roku and, from August, the iPhone. Netflix launched in Canada...
The European streaming service Americans could not get
In 2010 Spotify was available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands, often by invitation, with a free ad-supported tier and a premium plan. Americans read about it...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
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...
