Loading...
Global search
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...
A relationship confirmed by changing your relationship status; "FBO".
Facebook official: A relationship confirmed by changing your relationship status; "FBO". Example: "it's not real until it's Facebook official"
The Facebook game your aunt sent you requests for
FarmVille, launched by Zynga in June 2009, was the biggest game on Facebook in 2010 with tens of millions of daily players and more than 80 million monthly users at its peak. Its crops withered if...
Zynga's fastest-growing game ever, December 2010
CityVille launched on Facebook on 2 December 2010 and passed 20 million monthly users within two weeks, faster than any Facebook game before it. It was FarmVille with a city, and it showed that...
One-minute matches and a weekly friends leaderboard
PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz turned the match-three classic into 60-second rounds with a leaderboard of your Facebook friends that reset every week. In 2010 it was one of the most-played games on...
Text-based crime, energy bars and a lawsuit
Mafia Wars was Zynga's text-heavy crime game where you did jobs, recruited friends into your mafia and waited for energy to refill. It had millions of daily players on Facebook and MySpace in 2010...
Playfish's cute pets, bought by EA
Pet Society, from Playfish, let you dress up a pet, decorate its house and visit friends' pets, and was one of the largest Facebook games of 2010. Electronic Arts had bought Playfish for about $300...
Facebook's 26-year-old CEO and Time's Person of the Year
In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg was 26, running a company with 500 million users, the subject of an unflattering Oscar-winning film, and Time's Person of the Year. His hoodie, his privacy pronouncements and...
friend / unfriend: To add or remove someone on Facebook; "unfriend" was the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 word of the year. Example: "she unfriended me after the wall post"
Russia's Facebook, with a music library
VKontakte (VK) was the dominant social network across Russia and the former Soviet states in 2010. Its interface closely resembled early Facebook, but it let users upload and stream music and video...
poke: A Facebook feature that notified someone you had poked them, and nothing else. Nobody knew what it meant. Example: "why does my aunt keep poking me"
wall / wall post: The public message area of a Facebook profile; writing on someone's wall was the 2010 equivalent of a public shout-out. Example: "happy birthday!!! -posted on your wall"
The fading giant with glitter graphics and a Top 8
By 2010 MySpace had lost its crown to Facebook and was shedding users and staff under News Corp, which had bought it in 2005. In October it relaunched as a "social entertainment" site with a new...
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...
"You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies"
David Fincher's film about Facebook's founding, written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, opened on 1 October 2010 to rave reviews and won three Oscars. Its trailer,...
The social browser backed by Marc Andreessen
RockMelt, released as a beta in November 2010, was a Chromium-based browser with Facebook friends down the left edge and feeds down the right, built on the idea that the browser should be social. It...
The Firefox extension that hijacked Facebook sessions on café Wi-Fi
Released on 24 October 2010, Firesheep let anyone on the same open Wi-Fi network click into other people's Facebook, Twitter and Amazon sessions, because those sites only encrypted the login page. It...
m.facebook.com, WAP pages, and a web that did not fit
In 2010 the mobile web meant separate m.sites with stripped-down layouts (m.facebook.com, m.youtube.com), WAP pages on feature phones, and pinch-zooming full desktop pages on an iPhone. Responsive...
Nudges, winks and display names full of lyrics
Still called MSN by almost everyone, Windows Live Messenger was the dominant instant messenger outside the United States in 2010, with hundreds of millions of users. Its 2011 version, released in...
omg: Oh my god; added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011, having peaked in texts and Facebook statuses long before. Example: "OMG iPhone 4 has a front camera"
The blog that became a newspaper
The Huffington Post mixed aggregated news, celebrity bloggers and huge headlines into the busiest news blog of 2010, with comment sections in the thousands. Its traffic and Facebook-savvy strategy...
wtf: What the f***; the reaction to anything confusing, from a Facebook redesign to a Chatroulette stranger. Example: "wtf is a vuvuzela"
check in / mayor: To announce your location on Foursquare (or, from August, Facebook Places); the most frequent visitor became a venue's mayor. Example: "just ousted Dave as mayor of Starbucks"
A megabit or two on a good day, and the end of unlimited
Most smartphones in 2010 used 3G networks that delivered a megabit or two in practice, enough for email, Facebook and a slow YouTube video. AT&T ended unlimited data for new iPhone customers in June...
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...
"Y U NO" + any complaint, in broken English
Y U NO Guy, a rage face taken from a manga panel, became a 2010 image macro for exasperated questions: "Facebook, Y U NO let me dislike?" It was one of the first rage faces to jump from comics into...
like (verb): To click the thumbs-up on a post; from April 2010 also on any website with the Like button. Example: "37 people like this"
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...
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...
The original social network, thriving in Southeast Asia
Friendster predated MySpace and Facebook, and although it had faded in the West by 2010, it was still one of the most popular sites in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, with a Malaysian owner,...
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...
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...
Buddy lists and away messages, fading fast
AIM had defined instant messaging in America for a decade, with its running-man icon, buddy lists, door-opening sounds and passive-aggressive away messages. By 2010 it was losing users to Facebook...
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...
The social phone that lasted 48 days
Microsoft's Kin One and Kin Two, aimed at teenagers who lived on Facebook and Twitter, went on sale in May 2010 on Verizon and were discontinued on 30 June, after reportedly selling only a few...
Tiny, cheap Atom laptops at their peak, then killed by the iPad
Netbooks, the 10-inch, $300 laptops with Intel Atom chips that had exploded in 2008 and 2009, peaked in 2010. They ran Windows 7 Starter or XP slowly, had cramped keyboards and 1024-by-600 screens,...
Press the red button, flip out the USB plug
The Flip Video, owned by Cisco since 2009, was the pocket camcorder of 2010: a big red record button, a flip-out USB connector and one-click YouTube uploads. Millions were sold before smartphone...
12 megapixels, a 3-inch screen, and an SD card full of party photos
Most 2010 photos were still taken with compact digital cameras like the Canon PowerShot and Sony Cyber-shot lines: around 12 megapixels, a 3 or 4x zoom, 720p video, and an SD card that got emptied...
The show whose covers topped iTunes every week
Glee was the pop-culture juggernaut of 2010: its cast recordings sold millions on iTunes, its Madonna and Lady Gaga tribute episodes were events, and "Gleeks" organised on Tumblr and Twitter....
At its f8 conference Facebook let any website add a Like button and share data through the Open Graph, spreading Facebook's blue thumb across the internet within weeks.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that half a billion people were now using Facebook, launching a "Facebook Stories" site to mark the milestone.
Facebook unveiled a unified inbox combining chat, texts and email addresses, widely reported as a "Gmail killer"; it was not.
Hitwise reported that Facebook received more US visits than Google for the week ending 13 March 2010, the first time a site had beaten Google in its measurements for a full week.
After weeks of criticism over confusing, increasingly public defaults, Mark Zuckerberg announced simpler privacy controls; a "Quit Facebook Day" on 31 May drew tens of thousands...
Facebook added location check-ins to its iPhone app and mobile site, taking direct aim at Foursquare and Gowalla.
The question-and-answer site founded by two ex-Facebook engineers ended its invite-only beta, promising answers from people with first-hand knowledge.
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's film about Facebook's founding opened to acclaim and fixed the popular image of Mark Zuckerberg months before Time named him Person of the Year.
A free Firefox extension let anyone on a shared network take over other users' Facebook and Twitter sessions with one click, pushing major sites toward HTTPS.
MySpace unveiled a new logo and a redesign focused on music, film and TV, conceding the social-networking fight to Facebook.
Backed by Marc Andreessen, RockMelt put Facebook friends and feeds in the browser frame itself; it was bought and shut by Yahoo in 2013.
CityVille reached 20 million monthly players within two weeks, the fastest-growing Facebook game yet.
Time chose the 26-year-old Facebook founder, noting that Julian Assange had won the magazine's readers' poll.
