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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
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...
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...
Anonymous drunk texts, sorted by area code
Texts From Last Night posted anonymous text messages submitted by readers, tagged only with an area code, and became a 2009-2010 phenomenon with a book deal and a TV option. Alongside FMyLife, it was...
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...
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...
A moderator's power to ban users, imagined as a hammer.
banhammer: A moderator's power to ban users, imagined as a hammer. Example: "the mods brought out the banhammer"
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 movie database, 20 years old
IMDb celebrated its 20th anniversary in October 2010. Owned by Amazon, it was the site everyone opened to settle who was in what, with its yellow-and-black branding, user ratings out of ten, and...
tweet / RT: A Twitter post, and RT for retweet: repeating someone's tweet, by hand ("RT @user") or, from late 2009, with the button. Example: "RT @kimmel: my favorite video of the year...
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...
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...
The Facebook game your aunt sent you requests for
FarmVille, launched by Zynga in June 2009, was the biggest game on Facebook in 2010 with tens of millions of daily players and more than 80 million monthly users at its peak. Its crops withered if...
The one everyone skipped
Windows Vista, released to consumers in 2007, was widely disliked for its User Account Control prompts, driver problems and heavy hardware needs. By 2010 it was already being replaced by Windows 7 on...
Hardware acceleration and HTML5, in a minimal new frame
Released on 15 September 2010, the IE9 beta was Microsoft's answer to Chrome: a stripped-back interface with tabs beside the address bar, GPU-accelerated rendering, and real HTML5 and CSS3 support....
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...
Ten thousand coins for two pizzas
Bitcoin was a year old and worth almost nothing in 2010. On 22 May, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, the first recorded purchase with the currency. The Mt. Gox exchange opened in July,...
Zynga's fastest-growing game ever, December 2010
CityVille launched on Facebook on 2 December 2010 and passed 20 million monthly users within two weeks, faster than any Facebook game before it. It was FarmVille with a city, and it showed that...
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...
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...
A relationship confirmed by changing your relationship status; "FBO".
Facebook official: A relationship confirmed by changing your relationship status; "FBO". Example: "it's not real until it's Facebook official"
Having a large following on Tumblr and nowhere else.
Tumblr famous: Having a large following on Tumblr and nowhere else. Example: "she's Tumblr famous for her GIF sets"
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...
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...
Big in Latin America and Portugal
hi5 was one of the world's largest social networks in the mid-2000s, especially in Latin America, Portugal, Romania and Thailand. In 2010 it was pivoting toward social games and virtual gifts as...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Buddy lists and away messages, fading fast
AIM had defined instant messaging in America for a decade, with its running-man icon, buddy lists, door-opening sounds and passive-aggressive away messages. By 2010 it was losing users to Facebook...
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...
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...
Press the button, see a random great page
StumbleUpon's toolbar button sent you to a random web page matched to your interests, and its thumbs-up votes could send millions of visitors to an obscure site. Newly independent from eBay again, it...
LOLcats as a media company
I Can Has Cheezburger turned LOLcats into a business, and by 2010 the Cheezburger Network ran dozens of sites, including FAIL Blog and Memebase, publishing user-submitted image macros to millions of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6 with Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster JavaScript, the version most Firefox users ran through 2010.
The random-webcam site built by a Russian teenager exploded in February, reaching hundreds of thousands of daily users and becoming, per Google, the fastest-rising search of 2010.
Twitter's blog reported that users were sending about 50 million tweets a day, up from 5,000 a day in 2007; by September the figure was around 90 million.
Google began redirecting google.cn users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, effectively leaving mainland China's search market to Baidu.
Twitter announced its first advertising product, Promoted Tweets, and at its Chirp developer conference reported 105 million registered users and 300,000 new sign-ups a day.
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...
Mark Zuckerberg announced that half a billion people were now using Facebook, launching a "Facebook Stories" site to mark the milestone.
Google began displaying search results before users finished typing, claiming it would save two to five seconds per search, and changed how people searched almost overnight.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a free app for square, filtered photos; it gained 25,000 users on its first day and a million by December.
A free Firefox extension let anyone on a shared network take over other users' Facebook and Twitter sessions with one click, pushing major sites toward HTTPS.
