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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Rockstar's western, the game of the year for many
Red Dead Redemption, released on 18 May 2010, put Rockstar's open-world design in the dying American West. It won many game-of-the-year awards, its Undead Nightmare expansion in October became a cult...
AMC's zombie drama arrives on Halloween 2010
The Walking Dead premiered on AMC on 31 October 2010 to 5.3 million viewers, a cable record for a series premiere, and went on to become the most-watched drama on American television. It arrived...
Reviving a long-dead forum thread, usually frowned upon.
necro: Reviving a long-dead forum thread, usually frowned upon. Example: "nice necro, this thread is from 2007"
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...
The internet's meme encyclopedia
Know Your Meme documented the origin and spread of memes with the seriousness of an encyclopedia and the deadpan of a science show. Started by the Rocketboom video blog in 2008, it was the reference...
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...
A paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich, Photoshopped everywhere
A May 2010 paparazzi photo of Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich alone on a New York bench became Sad Keanu in June, when Reddit and 4chan users cut him out and pasted him into paintings, film stills and...
tl;dr: Too long; didn't read. A complaint about a long post, or a one-line summary placed at the end of one. Example: "tl;dr Digg v4 sucks, we're all on Reddit now"
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,...
wtf: What the f***; the reaction to anything confusing, from a Facebook redesign to a Chatroulette stranger. Example: "wtf is a vuvuzela"
Red envelopes, and a streaming-only plan
In 2010 Netflix was still mostly a DVD-by-mail company, but streaming was taking over: Watch Instantly worked on the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, Roku and, from August, the iPhone. Netflix launched in Canada...
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...
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...
Small share, big ideas: Turbo, Speed Dial and tab stacking
Opera had only around 2 percent of desktop browser usage in 2010 but kept inventing features others copied: Speed Dial, mouse gestures, Opera Turbo compression, and, in Opera 11 in December, tab...
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...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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 face for enjoying something you should not
Me Gusta, a bulging-eyed face drawn by Matt Oswald in March 2010, was the rage comic reaction for guilty pleasure. It spread through Reddit and Tumblr through the year and, with Trollface and Forever...
From Hyperbole and a Half to every to-do list
In June 2010, Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half published "This is Why I'll Never be an Adult", with a crudely drawn figure shouting "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS!" The panel became the template for "X...
Sunglasses drop, argument over
The "Deal With It" GIF, a pair of pixel sunglasses sliding onto a face, originated on the Something Awful forums in 2010 and became the standard way to end an argument on Reddit and Tumblr. It was...
Captain Picard, hand over face
The facepalm, especially the still of Captain Picard with his hand over his face, was the standard forum and Reddit reaction to stupidity in 2010, along with the double facepalm and the word itself,...
Digg's founder steps down after the v4 revolt
Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and a Web 2.0 celebrity, oversaw the August 2010 Digg v4 redesign that drove users to Reddit, and stepped down as CEO in September. He remained one of the era's...
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...
China's search engine, after Google walked away
Baidu was already the dominant search engine in China when Google stopped censoring google.cn in March 2010 and redirected users to Hong Kong. Baidu's share of Chinese searches climbed past three...
Books, Kindle, and a store that sold everything
Amazon in 2010 was the everything store with a cluttered tan-and-orange homepage, two-day shipping for $79-a-year Prime members, and a Kindle business so successful that the company said Kindle books...
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...
Conversations, labels, and 7 GB of storage
Gmail had left beta in 2009 and by 2010 was the email of choice for anyone under 35, with conversation threading, labels instead of folders and more than 7 GB of free storage. The year brought Google...
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...
Reviews of everything, and fights with restaurants
Yelp's crowd-sourced reviews of restaurants and shops were a habit for city dwellers in 2010, and its iPhone app was among the first with an augmented-reality feature (Monocle). Small businesses...
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...
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...
Verizon's big-screen Android, sold with a robot voice
Following the 2009 Motorola Droid that put Android on the map in the US, the Droid X arrived on Verizon in July 2010 with a 4.3-inch screen, an 8-megapixel camera and HDMI output. Verizon's "Droid...
The keyboard phone of the business world and the school corridor
The Bold 9700 was the definitive 2010 BlackBerry: a compact QWERTY keyboard, an optical trackpad, the red blinking notification light, and BlackBerry Messenger. Alongside the cheaper Curve 8520, it...
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,...
A strutting cartoon and a shrug at criticism
"Haters gonna hate", paired with an image of someone strutting obliviously (often a cartoon character or a walking pigeon), spread across Tumblr and Reddit in 2010 as the universal response to...
Rockstar's western became one of the year's most acclaimed games and a frequent game-of-the-year pick.
The zombie drama's Halloween debut drew 5.3 million viewers, a record for a cable series premiere, and launched a decade of live-tweeted Sunday nights.
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...
After the 12 January earthquake in Haiti, texting HAITI to 90999 gave $10 to the American Red Cross; the campaign raised more than $30 million and showed how mobile phones and...
Google began redirecting google.cn users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, effectively leaving mainland China's search market to Baidu.
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...
Digg's redesign removed favourite features and let publishers auto-submit stories; users flooded the front page with Reddit links, traffic collapsed, and founder Kevin Rose...
Twitter's redesigned website added a second pane showing photos, videos and conversations beside the timeline, its biggest visual change to date.
MySpace unveiled a new logo and a redesign focused on music, film and TV, conceding the social-networking fight to Facebook.
