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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Sunglasses drop, argument over
The "Deal With It" GIF, a pair of pixel sunglasses sliding onto a face, originated on the Something Awful forums in 2010 and became the standard way to end an argument on Reddit and Tumblr. It was...
One deal a day, and a $6 billion offer refused
Groupon emailed one local deal a day, half-price yoga classes or restaurant vouchers, that only activated if enough people bought in. It was called the fastest-growing company in web history in 2010,...
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"
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...
Collateral Murder, the war logs and Cablegate
WikiLeaks defined the news in 2010. It published the Collateral Murder helicopter video in April, the Afghan War Diary in July, the Iraq War Logs in October, and began releasing US diplomatic cables...
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...
Steam comes to the Mac, and sales that emptied wallets
Valve's Steam store launched on the Mac in May 2010 with Portal free for two weeks, and its holiday sales, with daily deals at 75 percent off, became a ritual. Steam had around 30 million accounts...
Do not feed the trolls
Trolling, provoking people online for amusement, was the internet's defining pastime in 2010, from YouTube comment wars to 4chan raids to Trollface. "Don't feed the trolls", "u mad?" and "problem?"...
Anonymous drunk texts, sorted by area code
Texts From Last Night posted anonymous text messages submitted by readers, tagged only with an area code, and became a 2009-2010 phenomenon with a book deal and a TV option. Alongside FMyLife, it was...
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,...
You are the controller
Kinect launched on 4 November 2010 in North America as a $149 camera bar that tracked your whole body and voice for the Xbox 360. Microsoft sold eight million units in 60 days, hackers wrote...
"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 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...
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...
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...
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...
Chat inside your inbox
Google Talk, and the Gmail Chat box built into the Gmail sidebar, let people message and video chat without installing anything. In 2010 it was quietly replacing AIM for many, and Google Voice calls...
Blogspot blogs with orange Bs
Blogger, Google-owned since 2003, hosted millions of free blogspot.com blogs in 2010, from personal diaries to recipe blogs to the MP3 blogs of the music-download era. A template designer launched in...
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...
Google's own Android phone, sold online
Google announced the HTC-built Nexus One on 5 January 2010 and sold it unlocked from its own web store for $529, an experiment in bypassing carriers that ended within months. With Android 2.1, a 1...
The first serious Android tablet
The 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, released in November 2010, was the first major Android answer to the iPad. It ran the phone version of Android (2.2 Froyo) stretched to a larger screen, could make...
The cheap touchscreen Nokia that sold in the tens of millions
Nokia was still the world's biggest phone maker in 2010, and phones like the 5230, a low-cost touchscreen Symbian handset, were why. It sold enormously across Europe, India and Asia to people who...
Samsung Focus, HTC HD7 and the Metro tiles
Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in Europe on 21 October 2010 and in the US on 8 November, with phones such as the Samsung Focus, HTC HD7 and LG Quantum. The Metro interface of flat live tiles...
An iPhone 4 without the phone, and the teenager's first iOS device
The September 2010 iPod touch borrowed the iPhone 4's Retina display, A4 chip and FaceTime camera, starting at $229. For millions of teenagers it was the first App Store device, used over Wi-Fi for...
Google puts Chrome on your television
Google TV launched in October 2010 on the $299 Logitech Revue set-top box and Sony televisions, promising web search and Chrome on the big screen with a full keyboard remote. The networks blocked it...
"Press X to Jason": the interactive drama
Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, released in February 2010, was a PS3 thriller told through quick-time events and branching choices. Its ambition drew praise, its awkward moments became memes ("Jason!"),...
The catchphrase of summer 2010
Antoine Dodson's warning to his Huntsville neighbours, "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband, cause they rapin' everybody out here," became the year's most quoted line after the Bed...
The droning horn of the 2010 World Cup, and the internet's loudest joke
The vuvuzela, the plastic horn that droned through every 2010 World Cup broadcast from South Africa, became a meme within days: browser extensions added a vuvuzela to any site, YouTube got a vuvuzela...
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.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
The daily-deals company walked away from what would have been Google's largest acquisition and filed for its own IPO the following year.
Google revealed that it had been hit by a sophisticated attack from China (Operation Aurora) and said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, setting up its...
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.
Google Buzz, a social feed built into Gmail, automatically followed people's frequent email contacts and exposed them publicly, causing a privacy backlash within days. It was shut...
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.
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.
Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a January video of Paul Vasquez weeping at a double rainbow in Yosemite; within weeks it had millions of views, an Auto-Tuned remix and a Microsoft advert.
Digg's redesign removed favourite features and let publishers auto-submit stories; users flooded the front page with Reddit links, traffic collapsed, and founder Kevin Rose...
Microsoft's controller-free camera for the Xbox 360 sold eight million units in 60 days and was hacked into open-source drivers within a week.
Netflix introduced its first US plan without DVDs and raised DVD-plan prices, signalling that streaming was now the main business.
WikiLeaks and five newspapers began releasing 251,287 US State Department cables. Within days Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard cut the site off, and its domain was dropped.
CityVille reached 20 million monthly players within two weeks, the fastest-growing Facebook game yet.
