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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
The psychic octopus who picked every World Cup result correctly
Paul, an octopus at a German aquarium, chose the winner of all seven of Germany's 2010 World Cup matches and the final by picking a mussel from a box, and became a global internet celebrity with...
The droning horn of the 2010 World Cup, and the internet's loudest joke
The vuvuzela, the plastic horn that droned through every 2010 World Cup broadcast from South Africa, became a meme within days: browser extensions added a vuvuzela to any site, YouTube got a vuvuzela...
"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 browser MMO played in the school library
RuneScape ran in a browser with Java, needed no download, and had millions of players in 2010. Its low-polygon world, skill grinding, Wilderness PvP and player-run economy made it the MMO for anyone...
app: A smartphone application; the American Dialect Society's 2010 word of the year. "There's an app for that." Example: "is there an app for that?"
Acknowledging a pun or a sly joke.
I see what you did there: Acknowledging a pun or a sly joke. Example: "'Bed Intruder Song' on the Billboard charts... I see what you did there"
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...
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...
poke: A Facebook feature that notified someone you had poked them, and nothing else. Nobody knew what it meant. Example: "why does my aunt keep poking me"
Rule 34: "If it exists, there is porn of it": one of the Rules of the Internet, from a 2003 webcomic. Example: "Rule 34, no exceptions"
Check in, become the mayor
Foursquare made 2010 the year of the check-in. Users broadcast their location to friends, collected badges, and fought to become the "mayor" of their coffee shop. The app's success pushed Facebook to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
A 9.7-inch tablet nobody knew they needed
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad on 27 January 2010 and it went on sale in the US on 3 April, selling 300,000 on the first day and a million within a month. It ran iPhone apps and its own tablet apps,...
Ray William Johnson, Smosh, nigahiga, Fred, Shane Dawson
In 2010 the most-subscribed YouTube channels belonged to comedians who edited themselves in their bedrooms: Ray William Johnson's =3 viral-video reviews, Smosh's sketches, Ryan Higa's nigahiga, Fred...
$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...
FFFFFUUUU, Trollface, Forever Alone, Me Gusta, Y U NO
Rage comics were crude, four-panel MS Paint strips about everyday frustrations, drawn with a shared cast of stick-figure faces. Born on 4chan in 2008, they peaked in 2010 and 2011 on Reddit's f7u12...
vBulletin, phpBB, signatures, post counts and the ban hammer
Before Reddit and Discord ate them, forums were where the internet talked in 2010: vBulletin and phpBB boards for every hobby, game and band, with avatars, signature images, post counts, moderators...
The browser that made feature-phone internet bearable
Opera Mini compressed pages on Opera's servers before sending them to the phone, which made it the most-used mobile browser in the world in 2010, especially on feature phones in India, Indonesia,...
Yahoo, Google, Ask, AVG, MyWebSearch... stacked five deep
Toolbars were the plague of the 2010 browser: bundled with Java updates, antivirus software and free downloads, they stacked below the address bar until the page was a slit. The Ask Toolbar, Google...
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...
"There's an app for that": 300,000 apps and counting
Apple's App Store passed 300,000 apps in late 2010 and had served billions of downloads since opening in 2008; the American Dialect Society named "app" its word of the year. Top sellers included...
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...
Google's social network that Brazil and India loved
Orkut, Google's 2004 social network, was largely ignored in the United States but was the biggest social network in Brazil and hugely popular in India through 2010. Its "scraps", communities and...
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...
Scrabble by push notification
Words with Friends, from Newtoy, turned Scrabble into a slow, asynchronous game between phones, with dozens of matches running at once. It was huge on the iPhone in 2010, arrived on Android in 2011,...
Johto remade, with a Pokéwalker pedometer in the box
The DS remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver reached North America and Europe in March 2010, bundled with the Pokéwalker pedometer. They sold more than 12 million copies and were the Pokémon games of...
Draw a line, watch the sledder ride it
Line Rider, the 2006 Flash toy where you draw slopes for a tiny sledder, was still a school-computer staple in 2010, and elaborate Line Rider tracks synchronised to music were a YouTube genre of...
Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, RSS and the Technorati top 100
In 2010 blogs were still the intellectual centre of the web: personal blogs on Blogger and WordPress, mommy blogs, MP3 blogs, political blogs, and professional blog networks like Gawker and Weblogs...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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.
Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins, then worth about $41, for two Papa John's pizzas, the first documented purchase of real goods with bitcoin.
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.
