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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Sponsor of the best Flash games
Armor Games sponsored and hosted many of the highest-quality Flash games of the era, including tower-defence hits and puzzle games, with a brown-and-orange site and a loyal community of players and...
Everything, by everyone: the Flash portal
Newgrounds was the original home of Flash games and animations, where amateur creators uploaded movies and games for the community to rate. In 2010 its Flash Portal still launched careers, and its...
Nickelodeon's Flash arcade
Addicting Games, owned by Nickelodeon's parent Viacom, was one of the most-visited casual game sites in 2010, with categories like Shooting, Puzzle and Sports and a front page of ad-supported Flash...
Flash games with achievements, bought by GameStop
Kongregate hosted thousands of free browser games with badges, chat rooms beside every game and a levelling system for players. GameStop bought it in July 2010, betting that browser games were the...
Free games, and the school-computer favourite
Miniclip was where school computer labs went to play 8 Ball Pool, Club Penguin's ancestors and hundreds of other Flash games. In 2010 it claimed tens of millions of monthly players and was expanding...
The trick-question Flash game every classroom knew
Splapp-me-do's The Impossible Quiz, from 2007, was still one of the most-played Flash games on school computers in 2010: 110 trick questions, three lives, and skips. It was the kind of small, cruel,...
The plugin that ran YouTube, FarmVille and every banner ad
Flash Player 10.1, released in June 2010, ran the YouTube player, Hulu, Pandora, FarmVille, every browser game and most animated adverts; Adobe said it was installed on about 99 percent of...
Always, I wanna be with you: the Flash game of 2010
Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack, released in February 2010, was the Flash game of the year: a rainbow-trailing robot unicorn dashing through a pastel dreamscape to Erasure's Always. It was played...
Monkeys, darts and the tower-defence craze
Ninja Kiwi's Bloons TD 4, released in late 2009, was one of the most-played Flash games of 2010 on Kongregate, Newgrounds and Ninja Kiwi's own site. Tower defence was the dominant Flash genre 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...
Two billion views a day, 360p by default
YouTube celebrated its fifth birthday in May 2010 by announcing more than two billion views a day. Users uploaded 24 hours of video every minute in March and 35 hours a minute by November. The player...
Flash on a phone, tethering, and a huge speed boost
Android 2.2, announced at Google I/O in May 2010, made Android phones two to five times faster with a JIT compiler, added Wi-Fi hotspot tethering, Chrome-to-Phone, apps on the SD card, and,...
Content-Aware Fill, and Flash CS5's blocked iPhone exporter
Adobe CS5, released in April 2010, brought Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill (the demo video went viral), 64-bit Photoshop on the Mac, and Dreamweaver's CSS improvements. Flash CS5 could compile Flash...
Draw a line, watch the sledder ride it
Line Rider, the 2006 Flash toy where you draw slopes for a tiny sledder, was still a school-computer staple in 2010, and elaborate Line Rider tracks synchronised to music were a YouTube genre 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...
One button, endless rooftops
Canabalt, made by Adam Saltsman in 2009 for a Flash game jam, invented the one-button endless runner: a man in a suit sprinting across rooftops as a city collapses. In 2010 it was on every...
Ragdoll physics and a level editor, born in 2010
Jim Bonacci's Happy Wheels, released in June 2010, was a gory ragdoll physics game with a level editor that let players share courses. It spread through Flash portals in 2010 and became a YouTube...
The web ran on plugins, and every one of them wanted an update
In 2010 the browser was a host for plugins: Flash for video and games, Java for RuneScape and bank sites, Silverlight for Netflix, QuickTime and RealPlayer for media, Adobe Reader for PDFs. Each...
An original one-button runner in the style of 2010 Flash games
Pixel Dash is this exhibit's own, original browser game, written for the time machine to show what playing a Flash game felt like in 2010: a fake preloader, a sponsor splash, a one-button runner and...
Flash storage only, and an 11-inch model for $999
On 20 October 2010 Apple reintroduced the MacBook Air in 11-inch and 13-inch sizes with flash storage instead of a hard drive, instant wake and no optical drive. At $999 for the 11-inch, it set the...
The iPad, the iPhone 4, and the war on Flash
Steve Jobs had his last great year of product launches in 2010: the iPad in January, the "Thoughts on Flash" letter in April, the iPhone 4 in June, the Antennagate press conference in July, and the...
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...
The horror game that made YouTube scream
Frictional Games' Amnesia, released in September 2010, gave players no weapons, only a lantern and a sanity meter. Its terror made it the perfect subject for webcam reaction videos, and it fuelled...
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...
A 9.7-inch tablet nobody knew they needed
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on 27 January 2010 and it went on sale in the US on 3 April, selling 300,000 on the first day and a million within a month. It ran iPhone apps and its own tablet apps,...
Native video, canvas and the end of plugins, still a draft
HTML5 was a working draft in 2010, but the fight over Flash made it a household word. YouTube launched an HTML5 player beta in January, Apple published a showcase in June, IE9 beta supported it in...
A writer, a flashlight, and the dark
Remedy's Alan Wake, released in May 2010 for the Xbox 360, was a Twin Peaks-flavoured thriller about a novelist fighting shadows with a flashlight. It launched the same week as Red Dead Redemption...
From Newgrounds Flash game to indie hit
Super Meat Boy, released in October 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade and in November on Steam, grew out of a 2008 Newgrounds Flash game. Its brutal platforming and a million sales made Team Meat a symbol of...
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...
Sneakernet in your pocket
In 2010 a 4 or 8 GB USB stick was how files moved between school, home and the print shop, before cloud sync was universal. Drives came free on lanyards at conferences, got lost constantly, and...
A terabyte for under $100, or 80 GB of flash for twice that
In 2010 a 1 TB desktop hard drive cost under $100, but solid-state drives were still exotic: an 80 to 128 GB SSD cost $200 to $300. Enthusiasts installed them as boot drives to cut Windows 7 startup...
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...
Tower defence with peashooters, on every platform in 2010
PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, released for PC in 2009, arrived on the iPhone in February 2010 (selling 300,000 copies in nine days), then the iPad, Xbox 360 and DS. Its lawn, its zombies and its...
Hexes, one unit per tile, and one more turn
Civilization V, released in September 2010, moved the strategy series to hexagonal tiles and one-unit-per-tile combat, and became a Steam fixture for the next decade. It was one of the year's big PC...
Retina display, FaceTime, and the antenna you could not hold
Announced on 7 June 2010 and on sale on 24 June, the iPhone 4 introduced the 960-by-640 Retina display, a front camera for FaceTime video calls, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p video, and a...
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...
"I am a motherf***ing ambulance"
A February 2010 cellphone video of a fight on an Oakland bus involving a 67-year-old bearded man became one of the year's first viral sensations, generating remixes, a Flash game and T-shirts. It was...
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...
Free TV on the web, with ads, US only
Hulu streamed current episodes of network TV shows for free with commercials, a revelation in 2010 when most television was still cable or DVD. Hulu Plus, a $9.99-a-month subscription with more...
Type a band, get a radio station
Pandora's Music Genome Project turned any song or artist into a personalised radio station with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Free listening was capped at 40 hours a month in 2010, the service...
Rockstar's western became one of the year's most acclaimed games and a frequent game-of-the-year pick.
Adobe shipped Flash Player 10.1 for desktops and, within weeks, Android 2.2 phones, with hardware video acceleration and touch support, while Apple's devices remained Flash-free.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
YouTube began offering an experimental HTML5 player that worked without Flash in Chrome and Safari, an early signal in the year's Flash-versus-HTML5 fight.
In an open letter Jobs explained why the iPhone and iPad would never run Adobe Flash, citing reliability, battery life and touch, and declared HTML5 the future of the mobile web.
Adult Swim released the rainbow-trailing Flash runner set to Erasure's Always, which became the browser game of the year.
Apple showed iPhone OS 4 (renamed iOS 4 in June) with multitasking, folders and iAd, and changed its developer rules to block apps built with cross-compilers such as Flash CS5's...
At its developer conference Google announced Android 2.2 Froyo with Flash support, open-sourced the VP8 codec as WebM, previewed Google TV, and launched the Google Font API.
Apple introduced 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs with flash storage from $999, previewed Mac OS X Lion, and announced a Mac App Store that opened in January 2011.
