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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
The largest online art community
DeviantArt was ten years old in 2010 and the home of fan art, digital painting, photography and Photoshop brushes, with well over ten million members. Its green pages, "deviation" uploads and llama...
6 Reasons the Listicle Ruled 2010
Cracked.com, the former humour magazine, was at its peak in 2010 with numbered list articles about history, science and pop culture that were funnier and better researched than they had any right to...
Communities, moods and friends-only posts
LiveJournal was the blogging community that fandoms, writers and teenagers had used since 1999. Owned by Russian company SUP since 2007, it was in slow decline in the English-speaking world by 2010...
Eminem's comeback, Kanye's masterpiece, and Arcade Fire's Grammy
Eminem's Recovery was the best-selling album of 2010 in the United States. Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released in November after his weekly G.O.O.D. Friday free downloads, topped...
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...
Three and a half million articles and a new default skin
Wikipedia was nine years old in 2010 and by far the largest reference work ever assembled, with the English edition approaching 3.5 million articles. In May the site switched its default look from...
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...
Name your price
Bandcamp gave independent artists a simple page to stream and sell their music, including "name your price" downloads in any format from MP3 to FLAC. By 2010 it was quietly becoming the fairest...
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...
Pixel rooms and furni
Habbo Hotel, the Finnish virtual hotel of isometric pixel rooms, was where teenagers hung out and traded "furni" in 2010. Its Shockwave client, guest rooms and games were a cultural touchstone across...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
A paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich, Photoshopped everywhere
A May 2010 paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich alone on a New York bench became Sad Keanu in June, when Reddit and 4chan users cut him out and pasted him into paintings, film stills and...
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 portal: mail, news, Answers and Flickr
Yahoo! was still one of the most-visited sites on Earth in 2010, thanks to Yahoo Mail, the news-heavy portal homepage, Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Yahoo Finance. Under CEO Carol Bartz, it handed its...
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...
Disney's virtual world for kids
Club Penguin was the safe, moderated virtual world where children waddled around as penguins, played mini-games and decorated igloos. Disney had bought it in 2007, and in 2010 it was one of the...
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...
Ripping CDs, LimeWire folders, mislabelled tracks and the 4 GB iPod
In 2010 music was files: ripped from CDs, downloaded from LimeWire or torrents, bought from iTunes, traded on USB sticks, and organised (badly) in iTunes or Winamp. A library of 5,000 tracks with...
The designer who named responsive web design
Ethan Marcotte, a web designer and A List Apart contributor, coined "responsive web design" in May 2010 and wrote the 2011 book that made it standard practice. Few articles have changed how the web...
Where filmmakers uploaded in HD
Vimeo was the arty alternative to YouTube in 2010: cleaner pages, HD playback, no ads in the player, and a community of designers, animators and indie filmmakers. Its first Vimeo Awards took place in...
Type a band, get a radio station
Pandora's Music Genome Project turned any song or artist into a personalised radio station with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Free listening was capped at 40 hours a month in 2010, the service...
Scrobble everything you play
Last.fm recorded ("scrobbled") every track you played in iTunes, Winamp or your iPod and turned it into charts, recommendations and neighbours with similar taste. In 2010 it was owned by CBS and was...
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,...
Skype's founders try music streaming in America
Rdio, from Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, launched in the US and Canada in August 2010 as a subscription streaming service with a social feed of what friends were playing. It beat...
Your personalised homepage of gadgets
iGoogle let you build a homepage of widgets: Gmail, weather, news, a to-do list and thousands of gadgets, with themes that changed with the time of day. In 2010 it was one of the most popular start...
The year everyone's photographer friend shot video too
DSLRs became affordable and shot HD video in 2010. The Nikon D3100 (August) was the first Nikon DSLR with full 1080p video and cost $699 with a lens; the Canon EOS 60D (August) added a swivelling...
Reader mode and extensions, in brushed aluminium
Safari 5, released on 7 June 2010 for Mac and Windows, added Reader (a clean article view), extensions, Bing as a search option and a faster Nitro JavaScript engine. On the Mac it was the default, on...
Billboard's year-end Hot 100 top five
Billboard's year-end Hot 100 for 2010 was led by Kesha's Tik Tok, followed by Lady Antebellum's Need You Now, Train's Hey, Soul Sister, Katy Perry's California Gurls and Usher's OMG. Eminem and...
The suicide mission
BioWare's Mass Effect 2, released on 26 January 2010, opened the year with one of its most acclaimed games: a squad-recruiting space opera whose final mission could kill your favourite characters...
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.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Ten billion songs sold, and the Beatles arrive
The iTunes Store was the centre of legal digital music in 2010: it passed ten billion songs sold in February, iTunes 10 arrived in September with the ill-fated Ping social network, and in November...
Apple released Safari 5 with a Reader mode for articles, an extensions system and a faster JavaScript engine.
