Loading...
Global search
Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Official music videos come to YouTube
Vevo, a joint venture of Universal and Sony launched in December 2009, put official music videos on YouTube with premium ads. In 2010 its channels for Bieber, Gaga, Eminem and Rihanna took over...
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...
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...
One take, one warehouse, one enormous machine
OK Go, already famous for their treadmill video, released a single-take video in March 2010 in which a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine plays out over four minutes. It was a YouTube sensation...
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 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...
Ripping CDs, LimeWire folders, mislabelled tracks and the 4 GB iPod
In 2010 music was files: ripped from CDs, downloaded from LimeWire or torrents, bought from iTunes, traded on USB sticks, and organised (badly) in iTunes or Winamp. A library of 5,000 tracks with...
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,...
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...
The most-viewed video on YouTube, and the most disliked
Released in February 2010, the video for Baby became the most-viewed video on YouTube in July 2010, overtaking Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, and eventually the most-disliked as well. Bieber, discovered on...
An iPhone 4 without the phone, and the teenager's first iOS device
The September 2010 iPod touch borrowed the iPhone 4's Retina display, A4 chip and FaceTime camera, starting at $229. For millions of teenagers it was the first App Store device, used over Wi-Fi for...
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...
The year everyone's photographer friend shot video too
DSLRs became affordable and shot HD video in 2010. The Nikon D3100 (August) was the first Nikon DSLR with full 1080p video and cost $699 with a lens; the Canon EOS 60D (August) added a swivelling...
The video that ruled YouTube in early 2010
Bad Romance, released in late 2009, dominated 2010: it was the most-viewed video on YouTube until Baby overtook it in July, won Grammys in 2011, and its "Rah rah, ah-ah-ah" hook was everywhere. Lady...
A nine-minute prison-break short film with product placement
The Telephone video, released in March 2010, was a nine-minute prison-and-diner short film co-starring Beyoncé, crammed with product placements for Virgin Mobile, Diet Coke and the dating site...
Communities, moods and friends-only posts
LiveJournal was the blogging community that fandoms, writers and teenagers had used since 1999. Owned by Russian company SUP since 2007, it was in slow decline in the English-speaking world by 2010...
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...
Everything, by everyone: the Flash portal
Newgrounds was the original home of Flash games and animations, where amateur creators uploaded movies and games for the community to rate. In 2010 its Flash Portal still launched careers, and its...
"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...
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...
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...
"Hide yo kids, hide yo wife": the most-watched video of 2010
Antoine Dodson's furious, funny interview on a Huntsville, Alabama news broadcast in July 2010 was Auto-Tuned into a song by the Gregory Brothers days later. YouTube named Bed Intruder Song the...
Grainy 640-by-480 video for Skype, Chatroulette and vlogs
Most 2010 laptops had a built-in low-resolution webcam, and desktops used a Logitech clip-on, which made Skype calls, MSN video chat, Chatroulette and YouTube vlogging possible but grainy. FaceTime...
Press the red button, flip out the USB plug
The Flip Video, owned by Cisco since 2009, was the pocket camcorder of 2010: a big red record button, a flip-out USB connector and one-click YouTube uploads. Millions were sold before smartphone...
The UK and Ireland's teen network, sold for a pittance
Bebo had been the biggest social network among teenagers in the UK and Ireland, and AOL bought it for $850 million in 2008. In June 2010 AOL sold it to Criterion Capital Partners for a reported...
The most-followed person on Twitter, the meat dress, Bad Romance
Lady Gaga was the biggest pop star of 2010: Bad Romance and Telephone ruled YouTube, she became the first person to reach 10 million Facebook fans and overtook Britney Spears as the most-followed...
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...
"I'm on a horse."
Wieden+Kennedy's Old Spice advert, starring Isaiah Mustafa in a single unbroken shot, was posted to YouTube in February 2010 and became the year's most-shared commercial. In July the campaign...
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...
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...
Chat inside your inbox
Google Talk, and the Gmail Chat box built into the Gmail sidebar, let people message and video chat without installing anything. In 2010 it was quietly replacing AIM for many, and Google Voice calls...
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 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...
The P2P client a court shut down in October 2010
LimeWire was the file-sharing program of a generation: a green-and-grey Gnutella client full of misnamed MP3s, fake files and viruses. On 26 October 2010 a federal court injunction forced it to stop...
Linux for people, with a new purple theme
Ubuntu 10.04, released in April 2010, was the Linux distribution most likely to be found on a netbook or a curious student's dual-boot laptop. It introduced a purple-and-orange theme, moved window...
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...
The Wii party game that outsold the critics' favourites
Just Dance 2, released in October 2010, was one of the best-selling games of the year despite lukewarm reviews, proving the Wii's audience wanted to dance in the living room. Alongside Rock Band 3...
Apple announced the ten-billionth song download from the iTunes Store, cementing it as the world's largest music retailer in the last years before streaming.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Ten billion songs sold, and the Beatles arrive
The iTunes Store was the centre of legal digital music in 2010: it passed ten billion songs sold in February, iTunes 10 arrived in September with the ill-fated Ping social network, and in November...
Apple's music event introduced Ping, a social network inside iTunes that flopped, a touchscreen iPod nano, an iPod touch with cameras, and a tiny second-generation Apple TV.
MySpace unveiled a new logo and a redesign focused on music, film and TV, conceding the social-networking fight to Facebook.
OK Go released the single-take This Too Shall Pass video, a warehouse-sized machine synchronised to the song, one of the defining web videos of 2010.
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.
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...
WikiLeaks released classified 2007 footage from a US helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed civilians and two Reuters staff, the first of the year's major leaks.
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.
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.
Over two days the Old Spice team filmed nearly 200 short video replies to questions from Twitter, Reddit and YouTube users, one of the most celebrated social-media marketing...
The Gregory Brothers Auto-Tuned Antoine Dodson's local-news interview into a song that became the most-watched YouTube video of the year and reached the Billboard Hot 100.
Twitter's redesigned website added a second pane showing photos, videos and conversations beside the timeline, its biggest visual change to date.
