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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
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...
Talk to you later; the sign-off of MSN Messenger and texting.
ttyl: Talk to you later; the sign-off of MSN Messenger and texting. Example: "g2g ttyl"
Conversations, labels, and 7 GB of storage
Gmail had left beta in 2009 and by 2010 was the email of choice for anyone under 35, with conversation threading, labels instead of folders and more than 7 GB of free storage. The year brought Google...
Word processing in the browser, shared with a link
Google Docs let students write group projects in the same document at the same time, which felt like magic in 2010. In January it began storing any file type, and in April it gained a rewritten...
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...
Every blog you followed, in one inbox
Google Reader was the RSS reader of choice for anyone who followed many blogs, with keyboard shortcuts, folders, and a Share button that made it a small social network of its own. In 2010 it was at...
Free web fonts for everyone, launched at Google I/O
Google launched its Font API and directory in May 2010 with 18 open-source typefaces, including Lobster, Droid Sans, Yanone Kaffeesatz and Inconsolata. Alongside Typekit (2009), it ended the era when...
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...
Buddy lists and away messages, fading fast
AIM had defined instant messaging in America for a decade, with its running-man icon, buddy lists, door-opening sounds and passive-aggressive away messages. By 2010 it was losing users to Facebook...
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...
Retina display, FaceTime, and the antenna you could not hold
Announced on 7 June 2010 and on sale on 24 June, the iPhone 4 introduced the 960-by-640 Retina display, a front camera for FaceTime video calls, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p video, 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...
"Hey Apple!": the web series that became a TV show
Dane Boedigheimer's Annoying Orange, a talking orange with a human mouth and eyes, was one of the biggest channels on YouTube in 2010, with episodes routinely passing tens of millions of views. Its...
China's search engine, after Google walked away
Baidu was already the dominant search engine in China when Google stopped censoring google.cn in March 2010 and redirected users to Hong Kong. Baidu's share of Chinese searches climbed past three...
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...
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...
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...
Google's unbranded laptop that was only a browser
On 7 December 2010 Google unveiled Chrome OS and shipped the matte-black, logo-free Cr-48 to testers in a pilot programme. The laptop ran nothing but the Chrome browser, booted in seconds, and...
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 fast newcomer with tabs on top and one box for everything
Chrome went from about 5 percent of worldwide browser usage at the start of 2010 to roughly 15 percent by December. Version 4 added extensions in January, version 5 in May was the first stable...
100,000 apps, and the Angry Birds free-for-all
Android Market, the store that became Google Play in 2012, passed 100,000 apps in October 2010. Its green robot storefront was messier than Apple's and full of free, ad-supported apps; when Angry...
The version that lingered for years
Android 2.3 Gingerbread arrived on the Nexus S in December 2010 with a darker, cleaner interface, a better keyboard, NFC support and copy-and-paste improvements. Because so many cheap phones shipped...
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...
Gingerbread and the first NFC Android phone
The Samsung-made Nexus S launched on 16 December 2010 as the first phone with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and an NFC chip, years before contactless payments mattered. Its curved "Contour Display" and...
Random strangers, webcam to webcam
Chatroulette paired you with a random stranger over webcam and let either of you hit Next. Built by 17-year-old Andrey Ternovskiy in late 2009, it exploded in February and March 2010, inspired piano...
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 alternative browser with a thousand extensions
Firefox 3.6, released on 21 January 2010, was the browser of choice for people who cared, with about 30 percent of worldwide usage. It added Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster...
The $2.99 ringtone business in its last big years
Ringtones were still a multi-billion-dollar business in 2010, sold by carriers and services like Myxer and Jamster, and Myxer was one of Google's fastest-rising searches of the year. iPhone owners...
Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, RSS and the Technorati top 100
In 2010 blogs were still the intellectual centre of the web: personal blogs on Blogger and WordPress, mommy blogs, MP3 blogs, political blogs, and professional blog networks like Gawker and Weblogs...
Sixteen, discovered on YouTube, and the most-searched person of 2010
Justin Bieber released My World 2.0 in March 2010, became the youngest solo male act to top the Billboard 200 in 47 years, and had the most-viewed video on YouTube by July. He was Google's third...
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...
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,...
Reviews of everything, and fights with restaurants
Yelp's crowd-sourced reviews of restaurants and shops were a habit for city dwellers in 2010, and its iPhone app was among the first with an augmented-reality feature (Monocle). Small businesses...
The internet's meme encyclopedia
Know Your Meme documented the origin and spread of memes with the seriousness of an encyclopedia and the deadpan of a science show. Started by the Rocketboom video blog in 2008, it was the reference...
Nine years old, still used by millions, hated by developers
IE6, released in 2001, still had a meaningful share of browser use in 2010 (around a tenth worldwide, concentrated in China and corporate offices). Google dropped support for it in Docs and Gmail in...
The most-viewed video on YouTube, and the most disliked
Released in February 2010, the video for Baby became the most-viewed video on YouTube in July 2010, overtaking Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, and eventually the most-disliked as well. Bieber, discovered on...
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...
At its developer conference Google announced Android 2.2 Froyo with Flash support, open-sourced the VP8 codec as WebM, previewed Google TV, and launched the Google Font API.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its 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...
Google announced its own Android phone, the HTC-built Nexus One, and sold it unlocked from a Google web store for $529, an attempt to bypass carriers that lasted only a few months.
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...
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...
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.
Google began redirecting google.cn users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, effectively leaving mainland China's search market to Baidu.
Fourteen months after its hyped debut, Google announced it would stop developing Wave, its real-time collaboration tool, because too few people used it.
Google disclosed that its Street View cars had been recording payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, triggering investigations in a dozen countries.
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.
Google began displaying search results before users finished typing, claiming it would save two to five seconds per search, and changed how people searched almost overnight.
Google disclosed that its modified Toyota Priuses had driven 140,000 miles on public roads with minimal human intervention, the first public word of the project that became Waymo.
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 opened an app store for its browser, unveiled Chrome OS, and began shipping the unbranded Cr-48 notebook to testers.
The random-webcam site built by a Russian teenager exploded in February, reaching hundreds of thousands of daily users and becoming, per Google, the fastest-rising search of 2010.
Office 2010 arrived with the Ribbon in every app and free Office Web Apps in the browser, Microsoft's answer to Google Docs.
Oracle filed a patent and copyright lawsuit over Android's use of Java APIs, beginning a case that reached the US Supreme Court in 2021.
Google and Samsung's Nexus S was the first phone with Gingerbread and an NFC chip.
