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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
The forums that cost ten bucks
Something Awful's forums, where an account cost $9.95, were one of the most influential communities on the 2010 internet. Goons popularised Let's Play videos, ran early Minecraft servers and produced...
From Something Awful screenshots to YouTube commentary
Let's Plays, playing a game while narrating it, began as screenshot threads on Something Awful and became a YouTube video genre by 2010, with Minecraft and horror games like Amnesia driving a boom...
Sony's glowing-ball motion controller
PlayStation Move, released in September 2010, paired a glowing wand with the PlayStation Eye camera for precise motion control on the PS3. It was Sony's answer to the Wii Remote, arriving two months...
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...
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 plugin that ran YouTube, FarmVille and every banner ad
Flash Player 10.1, released in June 2010, ran the YouTube player, Hulu, Pandora, FarmVille, every browser game and most animated adverts; Adobe said it was installed on about 99 percent of...
Black-and-white, silent, and the summer's indie darling
Playdead's Limbo launched on Xbox Live Arcade in July 2010 as part of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade. Its monochrome silhouettes, giant spider and puzzle-platforming won dozens of awards and helped...
Waveforms and timed comments
SoundCloud, founded in Berlin in 2007, was becoming the place for producers and DJs to share tracks in 2010. Its orange waveform player, with comments pinned to moments in a song, was unlike anything...
Blu-ray, free online play, and the year the Other OS vanished
The PS3 Slim, released in 2009 at $299, was Sony's console through 2010, with a Blu-ray drive, free PlayStation Network play and exclusives like God of War III, Heavy Rain and Gran Turismo 5. In...
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...
Kratos versus Olympus, in PS3 spectacle
God of War III, released in March 2010, was the PlayStation 3's graphical showpiece of the year, with Kratos climbing titans the size of mountains. It sold more than a million copies in its first...
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"
An original one-button runner in the style of 2010 Flash games
Pixel Dash is this exhibit's own, original browser game, written for the time machine to show what playing a Flash game felt like in 2010: a fake preloader, a sponsor splash, a one-button runner and...
The fading giant with glitter graphics and a Top 8
By 2010 MySpace had lost its crown to Facebook and was shedding users and staff under News Corp, which had bought it in 2005. In October it relaunched as a "social entertainment" site with a new...
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...
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 Facebook game your aunt sent you requests for
FarmVille, launched by Zynga in June 2009, was the biggest game on Facebook in 2010 with tens of millions of daily players and more than 80 million monthly users at its peak. Its crops withered if...
Always, I wanna be with you: the Flash game of 2010
Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack, released in February 2010, was the Flash game of the year: a rainbow-trailing robot unicorn dashing through a pastel dreamscape to Erasure's Always. It was played...
A Java game sold from a one-man website, before it ruled the world
In 2010 Minecraft was an alpha you bought for about 10 euros from Markus "Notch" Persson's website and played in a Java window. Survival mode had arrived in 2009, Alpha began on 30 June 2010, and...
Rockstar's western, the game of the year for many
Red Dead Redemption, released on 18 May 2010, put Rockstar's open-world design in the dying American West. It won many game-of-the-year awards, its Undead Nightmare expansion in October became a cult...
$360 million in 24 hours, the biggest launch in entertainment history
Call of Duty: Black Ops, released on 9 November 2010, sold about 5.6 million copies in its first 24 hours in the US and UK, worth $360 million, then the biggest entertainment launch ever. Its...
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...
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 $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...
China's biggest social network, built on QQ
Tencent's Qzone, attached to the QQ messenger, was by most measures the largest social network in China in 2010, with hundreds of millions of active users decorating their spaces and playing social...
Russia's Facebook, with a music library
VKontakte (VK) was the dominant social network across Russia and the former Soviet states in 2010. Its interface closely resembled early Facebook, but it let users upload and stream music and video...
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...
Free TV on the web, with ads, US only
Hulu streamed current episodes of network TV shows for free with commercials, a revelation in 2010 when most television was still cable or DVD. Hulu Plus, a $9.99-a-month subscription with more...
Text-based crime, energy bars and a lawsuit
Mafia Wars was Zynga's text-heavy crime game where you did jobs, recruited friends into your mafia and waited for energy to refill. It had millions of daily players on Facebook and MySpace in 2010...
The trick-question Flash game every classroom knew
Splapp-me-do's The Impossible Quiz, from 2007, was still one of the most-played Flash games on school computers in 2010: 110 trick questions, three lives, and skips. It was the kind of small, cruel,...
Red envelopes, and a streaming-only plan
In 2010 Netflix was still mostly a DVD-by-mail company, but streaming was taking over: Watch Instantly worked on the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Roku and, from August, the iPhone. Netflix launched in Canada...
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...
Five years in the making, finally released in November
Gran Turismo 5, delayed for years, finally shipped on 24 November 2010 with more than 1,000 cars and a mixed reception for its uneven car models and long install. It still sold millions and was the...
The horror game that made YouTube scream
Frictional Games' Amnesia, released in September 2010, gave players no weapons, only a lantern and a sanity meter. Its terror made it the perfect subject for webcam reaction videos, and it fuelled...
Any song, on demand, free, and legally doomed
Grooveshark let anyone stream almost any song on demand, free, from a slick Flash interface, because users uploaded the tracks themselves. It was hugely popular in 2010 and already being sued by the...
The European streaming service Americans could not get
In 2010 Spotify was available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands, often by invitation, with a free ad-supported tier and a premium plan. Americans read about it...
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...
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...
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.
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...
Adobe shipped Flash Player 10.1 for desktops and, within weeks, Android 2.2 phones, with hardware video acceleration and touch support, while Apple's devices remained Flash-free.
Microsoft named its motion camera Kinect, Sony dated PlayStation Move, and Nintendo revealed the glasses-free 3DS, the show's biggest surprise.
YouTube began offering an experimental HTML5 player that worked without Flash in Chrome and Safari, an early signal in the year's Flash-versus-HTML5 fight.
Sony's PlayStation 3 spectacle sold more than a million copies in its first week.
Valve brought its Steam store to Mac OS X, gave away Portal for two weeks to celebrate, and introduced Steam Play so one purchase worked on both platforms.
CityVille reached 20 million monthly players within two weeks, the fastest-growing Facebook game yet.
