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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Where MySpace and forum images lived
Photobucket hosted the images that people hot-linked into MySpace profiles, forum signatures and eBay listings. In 2010 it was one of the most-visited image hosts in the United States, quietly...
Social coding
GitHub, two years old in 2010, was turning Git hosting into a social network for programmers with forks, pull requests and profile pages. Rails, jQuery and Node.js projects lived there, and "fork me...
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...
File lockers, 72-minute limits and pirated TV
Megaupload and its video arm Megavideo were among the busiest sites on the internet in 2010, hosting everything from legitimate file transfers to full seasons of pirated television. Free viewers hit...
Five billion photos, and the iPhone as top camera
Flickr passed five billion uploaded photos in September 2010 and was the serious photographer's social network: albums called sets, Creative Commons licences, groups for every camera, and Explore's...
Wait 60 seconds, then download
RapidShare was the file locker of the late 2000s: paste a link, wait through a countdown, download one file at a time unless you paid for premium. In 2010 it was still among the most-visited sites on...
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?"
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...
Philosoraptor, Socially Awkward Penguin, Courage Wolf and friends
Advice Animals were image macros with an animal's head on a colour-wheel background and a two-line joke in Impact font. Advice Dog started it in 2006; by 2010 Philosoraptor, Socially Awkward Penguin,...
"Y U NO" + any complaint, in broken English
Y U NO Guy, a rage face taken from a manga panel, became a 2010 image macro for exasperated questions: "Facebook, Y U NO let me dislike?" It was one of the first rage faces to jump from comics into...
Anonymous, /b/, and the meme factory
4chan's anonymous image boards, especially /b/, generated much of the internet's meme vocabulary in 2010 and gave rise to Anonymous, which attacked PayPal and Visa in December in support of...
From Hyperbole and a Half to every to-do list
In June 2010, Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half published "This is Why I'll Never be an Adult", with a crudely drawn figure shouting "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!" The panel became the template for "X...
A strutting cartoon and a shrug at criticism
"Haters gonna hate", paired with an image of someone strutting obliviously (often a cartoon character or a walking pigeon), spread across Tumblr and Reddit in 2010 as the universal response to...
meme: An idea, image or joke that spreads and mutates online; in 2010 the word was crossing from Know Your Meme into ordinary speech. Example: "Sad Keanu is my favourite meme of the year"
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...
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...
"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,...
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...
Ethan Marcotte names the idea, May 2010
On 25 May 2010, Ethan Marcotte published "Responsive Web Design" in A List Apart, combining fluid grids, flexible images and CSS media queries into one approach. Before it, most sites served a...
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...
Microsoft's one-year-old "decision engine"
Bing had launched in June 2009 with a photographic homepage and a marketing budget that called it a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. In 2010 it took over powering Yahoo's search...
Plain blue links that killed newspaper classifieds
Craigslist looked exactly like it had in the 1990s: a list of blue links on a white page, city by city, with apartments, jobs, used furniture and missed connections. In September 2010, under pressure...
Dial-up subscribers, AIM, and a content empire in the making
AOL was spun off from Time Warner in December 2009 and spent 2010 remaking itself as a content company: it bought TechCrunch in September, ran Engadget, and still collected subscription fees from...
Captain Picard, hand over face
The facepalm, especially the still of Captain Picard with his hand over his face, was the standard forum and Reddit reaction to stupidity in 2010, along with the double facepalm and the word itself,...
From a Lonely Island song to a caption for everything
"Like a Boss", from The Lonely Island's 2009 SNL Digital Short with Seth Rogen, became a 2010 catchphrase and image macro: any mundane act, captioned "like a boss". It lived alongside "epic" and...
Reaction GIFs, GIF sets and Tumblr's looping economy
Animated GIFs, a 1990s relic, came roaring back in 2010 thanks to Tumblr's reblog culture: reaction GIFs from TV shows, GIF sets of scenes, and glitter graphics ironically revived. With no native...
The gesture of despair at stupidity, used as a one-word reply.
facepalm: The gesture of despair at stupidity, used as a one-word reply. Example: "*facepalm*"
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...
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...
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...
Flash videos, viral clips and content wars
eBaum's World was a 2000s viral-media site that collected funny videos, Flash animations and images, often without credit, which made it notorious among creators. By 2010 it was still busy but...
Acknowledging a pun or a sly joke.
I see what you did there: Acknowledging a pun or a sly joke. Example: "'Bed Intruder Song' on the Billboard charts... I see what you did there"
I can has cheezburger? Still going strong in 2010
LOLcats, cat photos captioned in lolspeak with Impact font, had been mainstream since 2007 and were still the most recognisable internet joke in 2010. Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat, Happy Cat and...
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.
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.
