Loading...
Global search
Websites, products, technology, people, media, games, memes, slang and timeline events, all with sources.
Hosted WordPress, and the software running the blogosphere
WordPress powered a large share of the blogs and news sites of 2010, and WordPress.com offered hosted blogs with themes and stats for free. WordPress 3.0, released in June 2010, merged the multi-site...
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,...
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...
The gesture of despair at stupidity, used as a one-word reply.
facepalm: The gesture of despair at stupidity, used as a one-word reply. Example: "*facepalm*"
Sending sexual texts or photos by phone; a moral-panic word of 2009-2010.
sexting: Sending sexual texts or photos by phone; a moral-panic word of 2009-2010. Example: "a school assembly about sexting"
friend / unfriend: To add or remove someone on Facebook; "unfriend" was the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 word of the year. Example: "she unfriended me after the wall post"
hashtag (#): A word prefixed with # to tag a tweet; proposed by Chris Messina in 2007, linked by Twitter in 2009, everywhere by 2010. Example: "#FollowFriday"
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?"
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...
The Ribbon everywhere, and Office Web Apps in the browser
Office 2010, released to consumers on 15 June 2010, put the Ribbon interface in every application, added the Backstage file view, and launched free Office Web Apps that ran Word, Excel and PowerPoint...
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...
Epic fail, FAIL Blog, and the Fail Whale
"FAIL", stamped over a photo of a mishap, was 2010's favourite one-word verdict, with "epic fail" for the worst cases and "WIN" for their opposite. FAIL Blog published a stream of them, and Twitter's...
refudiate: Sarah Palin's accidental blend of refute and repudiate, tweeted in July 2010 and named New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year. Example: "Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate"
meme: An idea, image or joke that spreads and mutates online; in 2010 the word was crossing from Know Your Meme into ordinary speech. Example: "Sad Keanu is my favourite meme of the year"
A Java game sold from a one-man website, before it ruled the world
In 2010 Minecraft was an alpha you bought for about 10 euros from Markus "Notch" Persson's website and played in a Java window. Survival mode had arrived in 2009, Alpha began on 30 June 2010, and...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
Blogspot blogs with orange Bs
Blogger, Google-owned since 2003, hosted millions of free blogspot.com blogs in 2010, from personal diaries to recipe blogs to the MP3 blogs of the music-download era. A template designer launched in...
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...
Tiny, cheap Atom laptops at their peak, then killed by the iPad
Netbooks, the 10-inch, $300 laptops with Intel Atom chips that had exploded in 2008 and 2009, peaked in 2010. They ran Windows 7 Starter or XP slowly, had cramped keyboards and 1024-by-600 screens,...
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,...
The American Dialect Society voted "app" its word of the year for 2010, beating "nom" and "junk"; the New Oxford American Dictionary had chosen "refudiate".
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Markus Persson's Minecraft moved from Infdev to Alpha, sold from his website for about 10 euros, and began its word-of-mouth climb through forums and YouTube.
Google disclosed that its modified Toyota Priuses had driven 140,000 miles on public roads with minimal human intervention, the first public word of the project that became Waymo.
