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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
I don't know; also "idc" (I don't care) and "idek" (I don't even know).
idk: I don't know; also "idc" (I don't care) and "idek" (I don't even know). Example: "idk maybe see inception again"
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"
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...
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...
Questions answered by people who were there
Quora opened to the public in June 2010, founded by two former Facebook engineers. Its promise was answers from people with first-hand knowledge, and in 2010 Silicon Valley insiders answered...
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...
A relationship confirmed by changing your relationship status; "FBO".
Facebook official: A relationship confirmed by changing your relationship status; "FBO". Example: "it's not real until it's Facebook official"
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...
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 professional network before it became a feed
LinkedIn in 2010 was the online résumé: profiles, connection requests from people you met once, and recruiters' InMail. It reported passing 90 million members around the end of the year and prepared...
The torrent tracker that would not die
The Pirate Bay was the world's best-known BitTorrent index in 2010, a year after its founders were convicted in Sweden. Its pirate-ship logo, comment threads and "legal threats" page made it a symbol...
Digg's founder steps down after the v4 revolt
Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and a Web 2.0 celebrity, oversaw the August 2010 Digg v4 redesign that drove users to Reddit, and stepped down as CEO in September. He remained one of the era's...
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 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"
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...
The blockbuster of 2010, and the BWONG that launched a thousand trailers
Christopher Nolan's Inception, released in July 2010, was the year's most discussed film online: forums argued about the spinning top, the trailer's booming brass note became the Inception BWONG...
The trailer noise that took over every trailer
The booming brass note from the Inception trailers, nicknamed BWONG or BRAAAM, became a meme in the summer of 2010: added to cat videos, mocked in parodies and copied by every film trailer for years...
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...
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"
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"
check in / mayor: To announce your location on Foursquare (or, from August, Facebook Places); the most frequent visitor became a venue's mayor. Example: "just ousted Dave as mayor of Starbucks"
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?"
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,...
Problem?
Trollface, a grinning MS Paint face drawn by Carlos Ramirez in September 2008, became the universal symbol of internet trolling by 2010. It appeared at the end of rage comics, in YouTube comments and...
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...
The face for enjoying something you should not
Me Gusta, a bulging-eyed face drawn by Matt Oswald in March 2010, was the rage comic reaction for guilty pleasure. It spread through Reddit and Tumblr through the year and, with Trollface and Forever...
"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...
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...
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...
"I am a motherf***ing ambulance"
A February 2010 cellphone video of a fight on an Oakland bus involving a 67-year-old bearded man became one of the year's first viral sensations, generating remixes, a Flash game and T-shirts. It was...
The catchphrase of summer 2010
Antoine Dodson's warning to his Huntsville neighbours, "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband, cause they rapin' everybody out here," became the year's most quoted line after the Bed...
The droning horn of the 2010 World Cup, and the internet's loudest joke
The vuvuzela, the plastic horn that droned through every 2010 World Cup broadcast from South Africa, became a meme within days: browser extensions added a vuvuzela to any site, YouTube got a vuvuzela...
Sunglasses drop, argument over
The "Deal With It" GIF, a pair of pixel sunglasses sliding onto a face, originated on the Something Awful forums in 2010 and became the standard way to end an argument on Reddit and Tumblr. It was...
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...
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...
Three years old and still catching people
Rickrolling, tricking someone into clicking a link to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, was a 2007 4chan prank that by 2010 was the internet's most famous bait-and-switch. In 2010 the original...
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...
You are the controller
Kinect launched on 4 November 2010 in North America as a $149 camera bar that tracked your whole body and voice for the Xbox 360. Microsoft sold eight million units in 60 days, hackers wrote...
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 question-and-answer site founded by two ex-Facebook engineers ended its invite-only beta, promising answers from people with first-hand knowledge.
Christopher Nolan's dream-heist film became the year's most-discussed movie online, spawning the BWONG trailer meme and endless ending debates.
