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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Waveforms and timed comments
SoundCloud, founded in Berlin in 2007, was becoming the place for producers and DJs to share tracks in 2010. Its orange waveform player, with comments pinned to moments in a song, was unlike anything...
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...
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,...
Word processing in the browser, shared with a link
Google Docs let students write group projects in the same document at the same time, which felt like magic in 2010. In January it began storing any file type, and in April it gained a rewritten...
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...
Twelve years later, the sequel arrives
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was released on 27 July 2010 and sold three million copies in its first month. It relaunched competitive real-time strategy, Battle.net 2.0 and the esports scene, with...
12 million subscribers and Azeroth remade
World of Warcraft reached 12 million subscribers in October 2010, its all-time peak, and its third expansion, Cataclysm, sold 3.3 million copies in 24 hours when it launched on 7 December, a PC...
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...
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...
Flash on a phone, tethering, and a huge speed boost
Android 2.2, announced at Google I/O in May 2010, made Android phones two to five times faster with a JIT compiler, added Wi-Fi hotspot tethering, Chrome-to-Phone, apps on the SD card, and,...
Free web fonts for everyone, launched at Google I/O
Google launched its Font API and directory in May 2010 with 18 open-source typefaces, including Lobster, Droid Sans, Yanone Kaffeesatz and Inconsolata. Alongside Typekit (2009), it ended the era when...
The Firefox extension that hijacked Facebook sessions on café Wi-Fi
Released on 24 October 2010, Firesheep let anyone on the same open Wi-Fi network click into other people's Facebook, Twitter and Amazon sessions, because those sites only encrypted the login page. It...
Text-based crime, energy bars and a lawsuit
Mafia Wars was Zynga's text-heavy crime game where you did jobs, recruited friends into your mafia and waited for energy to refill. It had millions of daily players on Facebook and MySpace in 2010...
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...
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...
File lockers, 72-minute limits and pirated TV
Megaupload and its video arm Megavideo were among the busiest sites on the internet in 2010, hosting everything from legitimate file transfers to full seasons of pirated television. Free viewers hit...
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...
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...
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...
One deal a day, and a $6 billion offer refused
Groupon emailed one local deal a day, half-price yoga classes or restaurant vouchers, that only activated if enough people bought in. It was called the fastest-growing company in web history in 2010,...
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...
6 Reasons the Listicle Ruled 2010
Cracked.com, the former humour magazine, was at its peak in 2010 with numbered list articles about history, science and pop culture that were funnier and better researched than they had any right to...
Wait 60 seconds, then download
RapidShare was the file locker of the late 2000s: paste a link, wait through a countdown, download one file at a time unless you paid for premium. In 2010 it was still among the most-visited sites on...
The first 4G phone in America, on Sprint's WiMAX
Released on 4 June 2010, the HTC Evo 4G was the first US phone sold as 4G, using Sprint's WiMAX network, which existed in only a few dozen cities. Its 4.3-inch screen was enormous for the time, it...
An original one-button runner in the style of 2010 Flash games
Pixel Dash is this exhibit's own, original browser game, written for the time machine to show what playing a Flash game felt like in 2010: a fake preloader, a sponsor splash, a one-button runner and...
"Press X to Jason": the interactive drama
Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, released in February 2010, was a PS3 thriller told through quick-time events and branching choices. Its ambition drew praise, its awkward moments became memes ("Jason!"),...
A black border, a photo, a word in serif, and a cruel caption
Demotivational posters parodied corporate motivational posters: a photo in a black frame, a one-word title and a deflating caption. Despair.com started the joke in 1998, and by 2010 the format was...
WikiLeaks' founder, the year's most controversial figure online
Julian Assange went from obscurity to global notoriety in 2010 as WikiLeaks published the Collateral Murder video, the war logs and the diplomatic cables. By December he was in a London court, Time...
Time chose the 26-year-old Facebook founder, noting that Julian Assange had won the magazine's readers' poll.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Hitwise reported that Facebook received more US visits than Google for the week ending 13 March 2010, the first time a site had beaten Google in its measurements for a full week.
More than 75,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan were published in coordination with The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel.
Blizzard's long-awaited sequel sold three million copies in a month and relaunched competitive real-time strategy and esports streaming.
Fourteen months after its hyped debut, Google announced it would stop developing Wave, its real-time collaboration tool, because too few people used it.
Twitter's redesigned website added a second pane showing photos, videos and conversations beside the timeline, its biggest visual change to date.
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's film about Facebook's founding opened to acclaim and fixed the popular image of Mark Zuckerberg months before Time named him Person of the Year.
Nearly 400,000 US Army field reports from Iraq, the largest leak in US military history at the time, were published with partner newspapers.
Black Ops sold about 5.6 million copies in the US and UK in 24 hours, the biggest entertainment launch in history at the time.
