SlangEditorial
viral
viral: Spreading rapidly by sharing; "going viral" was the ambition of every 2010 video, ad and blog post. Example: "the Old Spice ad went viral overnight"
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Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
viral: Spreading rapidly by sharing; "going viral" was the ambition of every 2010 video, ad and blog post. Example: "the Old Spice ad went viral overnight"
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...
"I am a motherf***ing ambulance"
A February 2010 cellphone video of a fight on an Oakland bus involving a 67-year-old bearded man became one of the year's first viral sensations, generating remixes, a Flash game and T-shirts. It was...
"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...
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,...
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...
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...
One take, one warehouse, one enormous machine
OK Go, already famous for their treadmill video, released a single-take video in March 2010 in which a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine plays out over four minutes. It was a YouTube sensation...
"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...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
Content-Aware Fill, and Flash CS5's blocked iPhone exporter
Adobe CS5, released in April 2010, brought Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill (the demo video went viral), 64-bit Photoshop on the Mac, and Dreamweaver's CSS improvements. Flash CS5 could compile Flash...
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...
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...
"You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies"
David Fincher's film about Facebook's founding, written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, opened on 1 October 2010 to rave reviews and won three Oscars. Its trailer,...
The year everyone's photographer friend shot video too
DSLRs became affordable and shot HD video in 2010. The Nikon D3100 (August) was the first Nikon DSLR with full 1080p video and cost $699 with a lens; the Canon EOS 60D (August) added a swivelling...
Grainy 640-by-480 video for Skype, Chatroulette and vlogs
Most 2010 laptops had a built-in low-resolution webcam, and desktops used a Logitech clip-on, which made Skype calls, MSN video chat, Chatroulette and YouTube vlogging possible but grainy. FaceTime...
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...
The most-viewed video on YouTube, and the most disliked
Released in February 2010, the video for Baby became the most-viewed video on YouTube in July 2010, overtaking Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, and eventually the most-disliked as well. Bieber, discovered on...
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...
Native video, canvas and the end of plugins, still a draft
HTML5 was a working draft in 2010, but the fight over Flash made it a household word. YouTube launched an HTML5 player beta in January, Apple published a showcase in June, IE9 beta supported it in...
Chat inside your inbox
Google Talk, and the Gmail Chat box built into the Gmail sidebar, let people message and video chat without installing anything. In 2010 it was quietly replacing AIM for many, and Google Voice calls...
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...
The video that ruled YouTube in early 2010
Bad Romance, released in late 2009, dominated 2010: it was the most-viewed video on YouTube until Baby overtook it in July, won Grammys in 2011, and its "Rah rah, ah-ah-ah" hook was everywhere. Lady...
A nine-minute prison-break short film with product placement
The Telephone video, released in March 2010, was a nine-minute prison-and-diner short film co-starring Beyoncé, crammed with product placements for Virgin Mobile, Diet Coke and the dating site...
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...
Official music videos come to YouTube
Vevo, a joint venture of Universal and Sony launched in December 2009, put official music videos on YouTube with premium ads. In 2010 its channels for Bieber, Gaga, Eminem and Rihanna took over...
From Something Awful screenshots to YouTube commentary
Let's Plays, playing a game while narrating it, began as screenshot threads on Something Awful and became a YouTube video genre by 2010, with Minecraft and horror games like Amnesia driving a boom...
Talk to strangers
Omegle launched in 2009 as an anonymous text chat with strangers and added video chat in March 2010 as Chatroulette's popularity surged. Its tagline, "Talk to strangers!", captured a moment when...
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...
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...
12 megapixels, a 3-inch screen, and an SD card full of party photos
Most 2010 photos were still taken with compact digital cameras like the Canon PowerShot and Sony Cyber-shot lines: around 12 megapixels, a 3 or 4x zoom, 720p video, and an SD card that got emptied...
Three years old and still catching people
Rickrolling, tricking someone into clicking a link to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, was a 2007 4chan prank that by 2010 was the internet's most famous bait-and-switch. In 2010 the original...
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...
The plugin that ran YouTube, FarmVille and every banner ad
Flash Player 10.1, released in June 2010, ran the YouTube player, Hulu, Pandora, FarmVille, every browser game and most animated adverts; Adobe said it was installed on about 99 percent of...
A megabit or two on a good day, and the end of unlimited
Most smartphones in 2010 used 3G networks that delivered a megabit or two in practice, enough for email, Facebook and a slow YouTube video. AT&T ended unlimited data for new iPhone customers in June...
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...
The horror game that made YouTube scream
Frictional Games' Amnesia, released in September 2010, gave players no weapons, only a lantern and a sanity meter. Its terror made it the perfect subject for webcam reaction videos, and it fuelled...
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.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
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.
OK Go released the single-take This Too Shall Pass video, a warehouse-sized machine synchronised to the song, one of the defining web videos of 2010.
YouTube began offering an experimental HTML5 player that worked without Flash in Chrome and Safari, an early signal in the year's Flash-versus-HTML5 fight.
The single-take Old Spice advert starring Isaiah Mustafa was posted to YouTube ahead of the Super Bowl and became the year's most-shared commercial, followed in July by a two-day...
WikiLeaks released classified 2007 footage from a US helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed civilians and two Reuters staff, the first of the year's major leaks.
Adobe shipped Flash Player 10.1 for desktops and, within weeks, Android 2.2 phones, with hardware video acceleration and touch support, while Apple's devices remained Flash-free.
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...
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.
Twitter's redesigned website added a second pane showing photos, videos and conversations beside the timeline, its biggest visual change to date.