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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
From a Twitter account to a CBS sitcom in a year
Justin Halpern's Twitter account quoting his father's blunt remarks gained a million followers in 2009-2010, became a bestselling book in May 2010 and a CBS sitcom starring William Shatner in...
Twitter's over-capacity page, seen constantly during the World Cup
Yiying Lu's illustration of a whale lifted by birds appeared whenever Twitter was over capacity, which in 2010 was often: during the World Cup, the Lost finale and the iPhone 4 launch. The Fail Whale...
The first pop star made by YouTube and Twitter
Justin Bieber, discovered on YouTube in 2008, became the biggest teen star in the world in 2010. Beliebers organised on Twitter, where a Twitter engineer said Bieber accounted for a noticeable share...
The weekly Twitter ritual of recommending accounts to follow.
#FollowFriday / #FF: The weekly Twitter ritual of recommending accounts to follow. Example: "#FF @biz @ev @jack"
Appearing in Twitter's trending topics list; by extension, popular right now.
trending: Appearing in Twitter's trending topics list; by extension, popular right now. Example: "#Inception is trending worldwide"
Shaking my head; disappointment in three letters, rising on Twitter in 2010.
smh: Shaking my head; disappointment in three letters, rising on Twitter in 2010. Example: "AT&T killed unlimited data. smh"
The most-followed person on Twitter, the meat dress, Bad Romance
Lady Gaga was the biggest pop star of 2010: Bad Romance and Telephone ruled YouTube, she became the first person to reach 10 million Facebook fans and overtook Britney Spears as the most-followed...
hashtag (#): A word prefixed with # to tag a tweet; proposed by Chris Messina in 2007, linked by Twitter in 2009, everywhere by 2010. Example: "#FollowFriday"
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...
tweet / RT: A Twitter post, and RT for retweet: repeating someone's tweet, by hand ("RT @user") or, from late 2009, with the button. Example: "RT @kimmel: my favorite video of the year...
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...
"I'm on a horse."
Wieden+Kennedy's Old Spice advert, starring Isaiah Mustafa in a single unbroken shot, was posted to YouTube in February 2010 and became the year's most-shared commercial. In July the campaign...
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...
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...
The series finale the internet argued about for weeks
Lost ended on 23 May 2010 with a two-and-a-half-hour finale watched by about 13.5 million Americans and dissected on forums, Twitter and recap blogs for weeks. The show's six seasons had been the...
The one-man studio behind Minecraft
Markus Persson, known as Notch, developed Minecraft largely alone in 2010, posting updates on his blog and Twitter and selling the alpha from his website. By the end of the year he had founded...
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,...
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...
refudiate: Sarah Palin's accidental blend of refute and repudiate, tweeted in July 2010 and named New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year. Example: "Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate"
The video that ruled YouTube in early 2010
Bad Romance, released in late 2009, dominated 2010: it was the most-viewed video on YouTube until Baby overtook it in July, won Grammys in 2011, and its "Rah rah, ah-ah-ah" hook was everywhere. Lady...
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....
Epic fail, FAIL Blog, and the Fail Whale
"FAIL", stamped over a photo of a mishap, was 2010's favourite one-word verdict, with "epic fail" for the worst cases and "WIN" for their opposite. FAIL Blog published a stream of them, and Twitter's...
Twitter's blog reported that users were sending about 50 million tweets a day, up from 5,000 a day in 2007; by September the figure was around 90 million.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Twitter announced its first advertising product, Promoted Tweets, and at its Chirp developer conference reported 105 million registered users and 300,000 new sign-ups a day.
The FIFA World Cup in South Africa drove record tweet rates, including 3,283 tweets per second after Japan's goal against Denmark on 24 June, and repeated Twitter outages.
Twitter's redesigned website added a second pane showing photos, videos and conversations beside the timeline, its biggest visual change to date.
The Library of Congress announced a deal to receive Twitter's entire archive of public tweets since 2006, a sign of how seriously the medium was now taken.
About 13.5 million Americans watched The End, and the internet argued about it for weeks on forums, Twitter and recap blogs.
Over two days the Old Spice team filmed nearly 200 short video replies to questions from Twitter, Reddit and YouTube users, one of the most celebrated social-media marketing...
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.
