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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with 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 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...
Social news, and the redesign that broke it
Digg let users "digg" stories onto a front page that could crash a small website with traffic. In August 2010, Digg version 4 removed favourite features, let publishers auto-submit content, and...
The blog that became a newspaper
The Huffington Post mixed aggregated news, celebrity bloggers and huge headlines into the busiest news blog of 2010, with comment sections in the thousands. Its traffic and Facebook-savvy strategy...
Your personalised homepage of gadgets
iGoogle let you build a homepage of widgets: Gmail, weather, news, a to-do list and thousands of gadgets, with themes that changed with the time of day. In 2010 it was one of the most popular start...
"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...
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...
troll / trolling: Someone who provokes others online for fun, or the act of doing so. "Don't feed the trolls." Example: "he's just trolling the YouTube comments"
Do not feed the trolls
Trolling, provoking people online for amusement, was the internet's defining pastime in 2010, from YouTube comment wars to 4chan raids to Trollface. "Don't feed the trolls", "u mad?" and "problem?"...
A newcomer, usually an incompetent or annoying one; "newb" was the kinder form.
noob / n00b: A newcomer, usually an incompetent or annoying one; "newb" was the kinder form. Example: "stop feeding, noob"
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...
Auctions giving way to Buy It Now
eBay was still the world's marketplace for used goods and collectibles in 2010, but its auction format was losing ground to fixed-price Buy It Now listings and to Amazon. It owned PayPal, which...
Every blog you followed, in one inbox
Google Reader was the RSS reader of choice for anyone who followed many blogs, with keyboard shortcuts, folders, and a Share button that made it a small social network of its own. In 2010 it was at...
China's microblog, one year old
Launched in August 2009 after Twitter was blocked in China, Sina Weibo grew rapidly through 2010, mixing 140-character posts (which fit far more meaning in Chinese) with images, comments and...
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...
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...
Square photos, filters, iPhone only
Instagram launched on 6 October 2010 as an iPhone-only app for square photos with retro filters and reached a million users by December. Its filters, such as X-Pro II, Lomo-fi and Earlybird, made...
The social browser backed by Marc Andreessen
RockMelt, released as a beta in November 2010, was a Chromium-based browser with Facebook friends down the left edge and feeds down the right, built on the idea that the browser should be social. It...
From a Twitter account to a CBS sitcom in a year
Justin Halpern's Twitter account quoting his father's blunt remarks gained a million followers in 2009-2010, became a bestselling book in May 2010 and a CBS sitcom starring William Shatner in...
Feed Om Nom: a million sales in ten days
ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope launched in October 2010 and sold a million copies in ten days, one of the fastest-selling iPhone games to that point. Its physics puzzles and green monster Om Nom were, with...
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...
Ask me anything, anonymously
Formspring launched in late 2009 and spread through high schools in 2010: a page where anyone could ask you questions, often anonymously, and you answered in public. It grew to millions of users...
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 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...
140 characters and the Fail Whale
Twitter turned four in 2010 and became the internet's newswire. Users sent about 50 million tweets a day in February and roughly 90 million a day by September, the Library of Congress agreed to...
Ten blue links, and results that appeared as you typed
Google in 2010 was a white page with a colourful logo, one box and ten blue links. The year began with Google refusing to keep censoring results in China, added a left-hand panel of search tools in...
Collateral Murder, the war logs and Cablegate
WikiLeaks defined the news in 2010. It published the Collateral Murder helicopter video in April, the Afghan War Diary in July, the Iraq War Logs in October, and began releasing US diplomatic cables...
From a local news interview to the most-watched video of 2010
Antoine Dodson became famous in July 2010 for his interview about an intruder in his sister's bedroom, which the Gregory Brothers turned into Bed Intruder Song. He shared the song's iTunes revenue,...
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...
Plain blue links that killed newspaper classifieds
Craigslist looked exactly like it had in the 1990s: a list of blue links on a white page, city by city, with apartments, jobs, used furniture and missed connections. In September 2010, under pressure...
Dial-up subscribers, AIM, and a content empire in the making
AOL was spun off from Time Warner in December 2009 and spent 2010 remaking itself as a content company: it bought TechCrunch in September, ran Engadget, and still collected subscription fees from...
The blog that bought a lost iPhone prototype
Gizmodo, Gawker Media's gadget blog, published the biggest tech story of 2010 on 19 April: photos and a teardown of a lost iPhone 4 prototype bought from someone who found it in a bar. Police raided...
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...
Facebook's 26-year-old CEO and Time's Person of the Year
In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg was 26, running a company with 500 million users, the subject of an unflattering Oscar-winning film, and Time's Person of the Year. His hoodie, his privacy pronouncements and...
Google Buzz, a social feed built into Gmail, automatically followed people's frequent email contacts and exposed them publicly, causing a privacy backlash within days. It was shut...
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
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...
Backed by Marc Andreessen, RockMelt put Facebook friends and feeds in the browser frame itself; it was bought and shut by Yahoo in 2013.
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.
AOL announced the acquisition of the Silicon Valley news site on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, part of its push to become a content company.
Nearly 400,000 US Army field reports from Iraq, the largest leak in US military history at the time, were published with partner newspapers.
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.
