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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
The social phone that lasted 48 days
Microsoft's Kin One and Kin Two, aimed at teenagers who lived on Facebook and Twitter, went on sale in May 2010 on Verizon and were discontinued on 30 June, after reportedly selling only a few...
The Ribbon everywhere, and Office Web Apps in the browser
Office 2010, released to consumers on 15 June 2010, put the Ribbon interface in every application, added the Backstage file view, and launched free Office Web Apps that ran Word, Excel and PowerPoint...
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...
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...
Samsung Focus, HTC HD7 and the Metro tiles
Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in Europe on 21 October 2010 and in the US on 8 November, with phones such as the Samsung Focus, HTC HD7 and LG Quantum. The Metro interface of flat live tiles...
Metro live tiles and a fresh start for Microsoft
Windows Phone 7 replaced the stylus-era Windows Mobile with a flat, typographic interface of live tiles and hubs, launching in October and November 2010. Reviewers admired the design and noted the...
Hardware acceleration and HTML5, in a minimal new frame
Released on 15 September 2010, the IE9 beta was Microsoft's answer to Chrome: a stripped-back interface with tabs beside the address bar, GPU-accelerated rendering, and real HTML5 and CSS3 support....
The Windows people actually liked, one year old
Windows 7 shipped in October 2009 and by the end of 2010 ran roughly a quarter of the world's desktop web traffic, while Windows XP still ran about half. Its Aero glass window borders, the new...
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...
The world's biggest webmail, redesigned
Hotmail, by then branded Windows Live Hotmail, had hundreds of millions of accounts in 2010, many of them the first email address people ever created. A mid-2010 update added Sweep, Office Web Apps...
Nudges, winks and display names full of lyrics
Still called MSN by almost everyone, Windows Live Messenger was the dominant instant messenger outside the United States in 2010, with hundreds of millions of users. Its 2011 version, released in...
The slim, glossy 360 with built-in Wi-Fi
Announced at E3 in June 2010 and in stores days later, the redesigned Xbox 360 S was slimmer, quieter, had built-in Wi-Fi and a 250 GB drive, and included a port for Kinect. Xbox Live, at $50 a year,...
Nine years old and still the most-used OS on Earth
Windows XP, released in 2001, was still the most common desktop operating system in 2010, running about half of the world's desktop web traffic. Its green Start button and rolling-hills wallpaper...
The one everyone skipped
Windows Vista, released to consumers in 2007, was widely disliked for its User Account Control prompts, driver problems and heavy hardware needs. By 2010 it was already being replaced by Windows 7 on...
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...
Nine years old, still used by millions, hated by developers
IE6, released in 2001, still had a meaningful share of browser use in 2010 (around a tenth worldwide, concentrated in China and corporate offices). Google dropped support for it in Docs and Gmail in...
"What does it mean?"
Paul Vasquez filmed a double rainbow over Yosemite in January 2010 and wept with joy on camera. The clip sat unnoticed until Jimmy Kimmel tweeted it in July, after which it became one of the year's...
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 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...
$200 million on day one
Bungie's last Halo game launched on 14 September 2010 and made $200 million in its first 24 hours, the biggest entertainment launch of the year until Black Ops. Its multiplayer, Forge editor and...
A writer, a flashlight, and the dark
Remedy's Alan Wake, released in May 2010 for the Xbox 360, was a Twin Peaks-flavoured thriller about a novelist fighting shadows with a flashlight. It launched the same week as Red Dead Redemption...
Free calls over the internet, video included
Skype was how families called abroad and how long-distance couples saw each other in 2010. It reported more than 500 million registered users, offered free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls, and...
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...
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...
Office 2010 arrived with the Ribbon in every app and free Office Web Apps in the browser, Microsoft's answer to Google Docs.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Microsoft discontinued its teen-focused Kin phones less than two months after launch, one of the most abrupt product failures in the industry's history.
Microsoft named its motion camera Kinect, Sony dated PlayStation Move, and Nintendo revealed the glasses-free 3DS, the show's biggest surprise.
Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a January video of Paul Vasquez weeping at a double rainbow in Yosemite; within weeks it had millions of views, an Auto-Tuned remix and a Microsoft advert.
Microsoft's IE9 beta brought hardware-accelerated graphics, HTML5 support and a minimal Chrome-like interface, but would not run on Windows XP.
Microsoft's rebuilt mobile OS with its Metro live-tile interface reached Europe and Asia on 21 October and the United States on 8 November.
Microsoft's controller-free camera for the Xbox 360 sold eight million units in 60 days and was hacked into open-source drivers within a week.
