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...
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...
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"
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 Game: A mind game everyone is playing; thinking about it means you just lost. Posting "I lost the game" made everyone else lose. Example: "I just lost the game"
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...
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...
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...
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"
The 99-cent game that defined the smartphone era
Released for iPhone in December 2009, Angry Birds became the best-selling paid app of 2010, arrived free on Android in October, and passed 50 million downloads across platforms by December. Its...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
Scrabble by push notification
Words with Friends, from Newtoy, turned Scrabble into a slow, asynchronous game between phones, with dozens of matches running at once. It was huge on the iPhone in 2010, arrived on Android in 2011,...
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...
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...
The Wii party game that outsold the critics' favourites
Just Dance 2, released in October 2010, was one of the best-selling games of the year despite lukewarm reviews, proving the Wii's audience wanted to dance in the living room. Alongside Rock Band 3...
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...
A Java game sold from a one-man website, before it ruled the world
In 2010 Minecraft was an alpha you bought for about 10 euros from Markus "Notch" Persson's website and played in a Java window. Survival mode had arrived in 2009, Alpha began on 30 June 2010, and...
Rockstar's western, the game of the year for many
Red Dead Redemption, released on 18 May 2010, put Rockstar's open-world design in the dying American West. It won many game-of-the-year awards, its Undead Nightmare expansion in October became a cult...
Swipe to slice, avoid the bombs
Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, released in April 2010, made the touchscreen itself the game: swipe to slice flying fruit, avoid bombs. It was one of the top-selling iPhone apps of the year and later a...
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 browser MMO played in the school library
RuneScape ran in a browser with Java, needed no download, and had millions of players in 2010. Its low-polygon world, skill grinding, Wilderness PvP and player-run economy made it the MMO for anyone...
BioWare's acclaimed space opera opened the year's run of major game releases and went on to win many game-of-the-year awards.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
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.
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.
CityVille reached 20 million monthly players within two weeks, the fastest-growing Facebook game yet.
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.
Adult Swim released the rainbow-trailing Flash runner set to Erasure's Always, which became the browser game of the year.
Rockstar's western became one of the year's most acclaimed games and a frequent game-of-the-year pick.
For Pac-Man's 30th anniversary Google replaced its logo with a playable version of the game, its first interactive doodle. It reportedly cost the world's workers millions of hours.
Bungie's final Halo game had the biggest entertainment launch of the year until Black Ops two months later.
Rovio released Angry Birds free with ads on Android; demand crashed the GetJar app store that hosted it, and the game passed 50 million total downloads by December.
Blizzard's third WoW expansion set a PC sales record weeks after the game hit 12 million subscribers.
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.
Time chose the 26-year-old Facebook founder, noting that Julian Assange had won the magazine's readers' poll.
