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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
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...
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...
A spectacular failure; the superlative of FAIL.
epic fail: A spectacular failure; the superlative of FAIL. Example: "Digg v4 = epic fail"
In before: predicting a reply before it arrives.
inb4: In before: predicting a reply before it arrives. Example: "inb4 someone posts the Fail Whale"
The opposite of fail; something excellent, also "full of win".
win: The opposite of fail; something excellent, also "full of win". Example: "the Old Spice guy's responses are pure win"
LOLcats as a media company
I Can Has Cheezburger turned LOLcats into a business, and by 2010 the Cheezburger Network ran dozens of sites, including FAIL Blog and Memebase, publishing user-submitted image macros to millions of...
Ten blue links, and results that appeared as you typed
Google in 2010 was a white page with a colourful logo, one box and ten blue links. The year began with Google refusing to keep censoring results in China, added a left-hand panel of search tools in...
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...
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.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 with a Retina display, FaceTime and a glass-and-steel design; the Wi-Fi in the packed hall failed during the demo. It went on sale on 24 June...
Microsoft discontinued its teen-focused Kin phones less than two months after launch, one of the most abrupt product failures in the industry's history.
A database failure took Tumblr offline for roughly 24 hours, a sign of how fast the site had grown in 2010 and how many people now depended on it.
