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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
China's microblog, one year old
Launched in August 2009 after Twitter was blocked in China, Sina Weibo grew rapidly through 2010, mixing 140-character posts (which fit far more meaning in Chinese) with images, comments and...
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,...
A black border, a photo, a word in serif, and a cruel caption
Demotivational posters parodied corporate motivational posters: a photo in a black frame, a one-word title and a deflating caption. Despair.com started the joke in 1998, and by 2010 the format was...
Read more before posting; the 4chan reply to a newcomer's naive question.
lurk moar: Read more before posting; the 4chan reply to a newcomer's naive question. Example: "lurk moar before you ask what a rage comic is"
Sarcastic dismissal of a boring or pointless post.
cool story bro: Sarcastic dismissal of a boring or pointless post. Example: "cool story bro"
Posting in a forum thread to push it back to the top of the list.
bump: Posting in a forum thread to push it back to the top of the list. Example: "bump, still looking for a Halo: Reach group"
The signature image or text under every forum post, often an animated banner.
sig: The signature image or text under every forum post, often an animated banner. Example: "nice sig, is that from your guild?"
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...
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...
tl;dr: Too long; didn't read. A complaint about a long post, or a one-line summary placed at the end of one. Example: "tl;dr Digg v4 sucks, we're all on Reddit now"
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"
In before: predicting a reply before it arrives.
inb4: In before: predicting a reply before it arrives. Example: "inb4 someone posts the Fail Whale"
like (verb): To click the thumbs-up on a post; from April 2010 also on any website with the Like button. Example: "37 people like this"
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"
tweet / RT: A Twitter post, and RT for retweet: repeating someone's tweet, by hand ("RT @user") or, from late 2009, with the button. Example: "RT @kimmel: my favorite video of the year...
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"
viral: Spreading rapidly by sharing; "going viral" was the ambition of every 2010 video, ad and blog post. Example: "the Old Spice ad went viral overnight"
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"
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...
"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...
Native video, canvas and the end of plugins, still a draft
HTML5 was a working draft in 2010, but the fight over Flash made it a household word. YouTube launched an HTML5 player beta in January, Apple published a showcase in June, IE9 beta supported it in...
Ten thousand coins for two pizzas
Bitcoin was a year old and worth almost nothing in 2010. On 22 May, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, the first recorded purchase with the currency. The Mt. Gox exchange opened in July,...
The rage face for loneliness, born in May 2010
Forever Alone, a lumpy, tearful rage face first posted in a comic about a fake date in May 2010, became one of the year's most-used images: the face of solitary Friday nights, empty inboxes and...
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...
A hooded pianist serenading strangers
In March 2010 a hooded man known as Merton posted videos of himself improvising songs about the strangers Chatroulette paired him with, and their reactions. It was the site's most charming moment and...
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...
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...
Hosted WordPress, and the software running the blogosphere
WordPress powered a large share of the blogs and news sites of 2010, and WordPress.com offered hosted blogs with themes and stats for free. WordPress 3.0, released in June 2010, merged the multi-site...
Start-up news, bought by AOL
TechCrunch was the loudest voice covering Silicon Valley start-ups in 2010, from Michael Arrington's scoops to the Disrupt conference. AOL announced it was buying the site in September 2010, an early...
The blog that bought a lost iPhone prototype
Gizmodo, Gawker Media's gadget blog, published the biggest tech story of 2010 on 19 April: photos and a teardown of a lost iPhone 4 prototype bought from someone who found it in a bar. Police raided...
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 tiny touchscreen square that people wore as a watch
The 2010 iPod nano dropped the click wheel and video camera for a 1.5-inch multitouch square with a clip, the size of a postage stamp. Watch-strap accessories turned it into an unofficial smartwatch...
The single-take Old Spice advert starring Isaiah Mustafa was posted to YouTube ahead of the Super Bowl and became the year's most-shared commercial, followed in July by a two-day...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
The front page of the internet, before it was
In 2010 Reddit was a spartan, text-heavy site owned by Condé Nast, far smaller than Digg at the start of the year. Digg's disastrous August redesign sent a wave of users to Reddit, and subreddits...
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 Gregory Brothers Auto-Tuned Antoine Dodson's local-news interview into a song that became the most-watched YouTube video of the year and reached the Billboard Hot 100.
