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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
The former Ask Jeeves gives up on search
Ask.com, once Ask Jeeves with its butler mascot, still had a few percent of US searches in 2010, largely through toolbars bundled with downloads. In November 2010 it announced it was leaving the...
Read more before posting; the 4chan reply to a newcomer's naive question.
lurk moar: Read more before posting; the 4chan reply to a newcomer's naive question. Example: "lurk moar before you ask what a rage comic is"
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...
Yahoo, Google, Ask, AVG, MyWebSearch... stacked five deep
Toolbars were the plague of the 2010 browser: bundled with Java updates, antivirus software and free downloads, they stacked below the address bar until the page was a slit. The Ask Toolbar, Google...
Reblogs, GIFs and the dark blue dashboard
Tumblr grew explosively in 2010. Its dashboard, a dark blue page of posts from the blogs you followed, made reblogging and animated GIFs the currency of a new creative culture, from fandoms to...
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...
Talk to strangers
Omegle launched in 2009 as an anonymous text chat with strangers and added video chat in March 2010 as Chatroulette's popularity surged. Its tagline, "Talk to strangers!", captured a moment when...
Programming answers, upvoted
Stack Overflow, launched in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, had become the default place programmers looked for answers by 2010. The reputation system, accepted-answer ticks and the Stack...
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...
FFFFFUUUU, Trollface, Forever Alone, Me Gusta, Y U NO
Rage comics were crude, four-panel MS Paint strips about everyday frustrations, drawn with a shared cast of stick-figure faces. Born on 4chan in 2008, they peaked in 2010 and 2011 on Reddit's f7u12...
The rage face for loneliness, born in May 2010
Forever Alone, a lumpy, tearful rage face first posted in a comic about a fake date in May 2010, became one of the year's most-used images: the face of solitary Friday nights, empty inboxes and...
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...
Five billion photos, and the iPhone as top camera
Flickr passed five billion uploaded photos in September 2010 and was the serious photographer's social network: albums called sets, Creative Commons licences, groups for every camera, and Explore's...
Sketch comedy before YouTube channels
CollegeHumor produced original comedy videos, such as Jake and Amir and Hardly Working, and hosted user-submitted pictures and articles. In 2010 it was one of the few sites making professional web...
tl;dr: Too long; didn't read. A complaint about a long post, or a one-line summary placed at the end of one. Example: "tl;dr Digg v4 sucks, we're all on Reddit now"
troll / trolling: Someone who provokes others online for fun, or the act of doing so. "Don't feed the trolls." Example: "he's just trolling the YouTube comments"
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,...
The default browser of Windows 7 and roughly a third of the web
Internet Explorer 8, bundled with Windows 7, was the single most-used browser version of 2010. It had tabs, a separate search box beside the address bar, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and a...
vBulletin, phpBB, signatures, post counts and the ban hammer
Before Reddit and Discord ate them, forums were where the internet talked in 2010: vBulletin and phpBB boards for every hobby, game and band, with avatars, signature images, post counts, moderators...
Problem?
Trollface, a grinning MS Paint face drawn by Carlos Ramirez in September 2008, became the universal symbol of internet trolling by 2010. It appeared at the end of rage comics, in YouTube comments and...
The face for enjoying something you should not
Me Gusta, a bulging-eyed face drawn by Matt Oswald in March 2010, was the rage comic reaction for guilty pleasure. It spread through Reddit and Tumblr through the year and, with Trollface and Forever...
"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...
Be right back; announced in chat before stepping away from MSN or AIM.
brb: Be right back; announced in chat before stepping away from MSN or AIM. Example: "brb mom needs the computer"
A computational knowledge engine
Launched in May 2009, Wolfram|Alpha answered questions by computing rather than searching: type a maths problem, a date, or two cities and it returned calculated results. In 2010 it was the site...
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...
reblog: To repost someone's Tumblr post to your own blog, with or without commentary; Tumblr's core verb. Example: "this got 40,000 notes after one reblog"
totes / obvs: Totally and obviously, shortened; the texting abbreviations that were about to become spoken slang. Example: "totes coming to the party, obvs"
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...
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...
Cards, gestures and a company bought by HP
Palm's webOS phones, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, arrived on Verizon in January 2010 with card-based multitasking that iOS and Android later copied. Palm's sales were weak, and HP announced it was...
The comics that lived in Google Reader
xkcd's stick-figure science jokes, The Oatmeal's ranting infographics and Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half were among the most-shared things on the 2010 web, spreading through RSS, StumbleUpon and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The P2P client a court shut down in October 2010
LimeWire was the file-sharing program of a generation: a green-and-grey Gnutella client full of misnamed MP3s, fake files and viruses. On 26 October 2010 a federal court injunction forced it to stop...
Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive and a DVD burner
The mainstream laptop of 2010, from Dell, HP, Toshiba or Acer, ran Windows 7 Home Premium on an Intel Core 2 Duo or the new Core i3, with 3 or 4 GB of RAM, a 250 to 500 GB spinning hard drive, a...
DSL or cable, a few megabits, and a router with WEP
About two-thirds of American adults had home broadband in 2010, according to Pew, mostly DSL or cable at speeds of a few megabits per second; the FCC's National Broadband Plan set a target of 4 Mbps...
The single-take Old Spice advert starring Isaiah Mustafa was posted to YouTube ahead of the Super Bowl and became the year's most-shared commercial, followed in July by a two-day...
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...
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...
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...
Ethan Marcotte's A List Apart article combined fluid grids, flexible images and media queries into a single approach and gave it a name that stuck.
Blizzard's long-awaited sequel sold three million copies in a month and relaunched competitive real-time strategy and esports streaming.
Amazon's third-generation Kindle, with a sharper E Ink screen and a Wi-Fi-only price of $139, became the company's fastest-selling Kindle.
AOL announced the acquisition of the Silicon Valley news site on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, part of its push to become a content company.
Facebook unveiled a unified inbox combining chat, texts and email addresses, widely reported as a "Gmail killer"; it was not.
comScore reported US online spending of about $1.03 billion on 29 November 2010, the heaviest online shopping day recorded to that point.
The daily-deals company walked away from what would have been Google's largest acquisition and filed for its own IPO the following year.
In Operation Payback, Anonymous volunteers used the LOIC tool to knock the websites of companies that had cut off WikiLeaks offline for hours.
Minecraft moved from Alpha to Beta on 20 December after selling hundreds of thousands of copies, with Mojang now a company of several employees.
The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 for net-neutrality rules against blocking and unreasonable discrimination by fixed broadband providers, rules later struck down in...
