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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
F*** my life; the sigh of the 2010 status update, popularised by the site FMyLife.
fml: F*** my life; the sigh of the 2010 status update, popularised by the site FMyLife. Example: "dropped my new iPhone 4 on day one. fml"
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...
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...
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...
The Firefox extension that hijacked Facebook sessions on café Wi-Fi
Released on 24 October 2010, Firesheep let anyone on the same open Wi-Fi network click into other people's Facebook, Twitter and Amazon sessions, because those sites only encrypted the login page. It...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Three and a half million articles and a new default skin
Wikipedia was nine years old in 2010 and by far the largest reference work ever assembled, with the English edition approaching 3.5 million articles. In May the site switched its default look from...
The default browser of Windows 7 and roughly a third of the web
Internet Explorer 8, bundled with Windows 7, was the single most-used browser version of 2010. It had tabs, a separate search box beside the address bar, Accelerators, InPrivate browsing and a...
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,...
The web ran on plugins, and every one of them wanted an update
In 2010 the browser was a host for plugins: Flash for video and games, Java for RuneScape and bank sites, Silverlight for Netflix, QuickTime and RealPlayer for media, Adobe Reader for PDFs. Each...
Write less, do more: the JavaScript library on most of the web
jQuery 1.4, released in January 2010, was the JavaScript library almost every site used to animate menus, load content with Ajax and paper over browser differences, especially Internet Explorer's....
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...
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...
m.facebook.com, WAP pages, and a web that did not fit
In 2010 the mobile web meant separate m.sites with stripped-down layouts (m.facebook.com, m.youtube.com), WAP pages on feature phones, and pinch-zooming full desktop pages on an iPhone. Responsive...
The first pop star made by YouTube and Twitter
Justin Bieber, discovered on YouTube in 2008, became the biggest teen star in the world in 2010. Beliebers organised on Twitter, where a Twitter engineer said Bieber accounted for a noticeable share...
The original social network, thriving in Southeast Asia
Friendster predated MySpace and Facebook, and although it had faded in the West by 2010, it was still one of the most popular sites in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, with a Malaysian owner,...
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...
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 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,...
The portal: mail, news, Answers and Flickr
Yahoo! was still one of the most-visited sites on Earth in 2010, thanks to Yahoo Mail, the news-heavy portal homepage, Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Yahoo Finance. Under CEO Carol Bartz, it handed its...
The former Ask Jeeves gives up on search
Ask.com, once Ask Jeeves with its butler mascot, still had a few percent of US searches in 2010, largely through toolbars bundled with downloads. In November 2010 it announced it was leaving the...
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...
Press the button, see a random great page
StumbleUpon's toolbar button sent you to a random web page matched to your interests, and its thumbs-up votes could send millions of visitors to an obscure site. Newly independent from eBay again, it...
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...
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...
The movie database, 20 years old
IMDb celebrated its 20th anniversary in October 2010. Owned by Amazon, it was the site everyone opened to settle who was in what, with its yellow-and-black branding, user ratings out of ten, and...
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...
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 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...
Sketch comedy before YouTube channels
CollegeHumor produced original comedy videos, such as Jake and Amir and Hardly Working, and hosted user-submitted pictures and articles. In 2010 it was one of the few sites making professional web...
Flash games with achievements, bought by GameStop
Kongregate hosted thousands of free browser games with badges, chat rooms beside every game and a levelling system for players. GameStop bought it in July 2010, betting that browser games were the...
Nickelodeon's Flash arcade
Addicting Games, owned by Nickelodeon's parent Viacom, was one of the most-visited casual game sites in 2010, with categories like Shooting, Puzzle and Sports and a front page of ad-supported Flash...
Sponsor of the best Flash games
Armor Games sponsored and hosted many of the highest-quality Flash games of the era, including tower-defence hits and puzzle games, with a brown-and-orange site and a loyal community of players and...
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.
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...
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 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.
Google began redirecting google.cn users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, effectively leaving mainland China's search market to Baidu.
The question-and-answer site founded by two ex-Facebook engineers ended its invite-only beta, promising answers from people with first-hand knowledge.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that half a billion people were now using Facebook, launching a "Facebook Stories" site to mark the milestone.
Facebook added location check-ins to its iPhone app and mobile site, taking direct aim at Foursquare and Gowalla.
AOL announced the acquisition of the Silicon Valley news site on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, part of its push to become a content company.
A free Firefox extension let anyone on a shared network take over other users' Facebook and Twitter sessions with one click, pushing major sites toward HTTPS.
MySpace unveiled a new logo and a redesign focused on music, film and TV, conceding the social-networking fight to Facebook.
WikiLeaks and five newspapers began releasing 251,287 US State Department cables. Within days Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard cut the site off, and its domain was dropped.
A database failure took Tumblr offline for roughly 24 hours, a sign of how fast the site had grown in 2010 and how many people now depended on it.
An internal Yahoo slide listing Delicious among services to be shut down leaked, prompting a mass export of bookmarks; Yahoo sold the site to AVOS the following year.
