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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...
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...
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...
troll / trolling: Someone who provokes others online for fun, or the act of doing so. "Don't feed the trolls." Example: "he's just trolling the YouTube comments"
Do not feed the trolls
Trolling, provoking people online for amusement, was the internet's defining pastime in 2010, from YouTube comment wars to 4chan raids to Trollface. "Don't feed the trolls", "u mad?" and "problem?"...
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...
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...
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...
Problem?
Trollface, a grinning MS Paint face drawn by Carlos Ramirez in September 2008, became the universal symbol of internet trolling by 2010. It appeared at the end of rage comics, in YouTube comments and...
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...
"Hey Apple!": the web series that became a TV show
Dane Boedigheimer's Annoying Orange, a talking orange with a human mouth and eyes, was one of the biggest channels on YouTube in 2010, with episodes routinely passing tens of millions of views. Its...
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...
The first pop star made by YouTube and Twitter
Justin Bieber, discovered on YouTube in 2008, became the biggest teen star in the world in 2010. Beliebers organised on Twitter, where a Twitter engineer said Bieber accounted for a noticeable share...
Sixteen, discovered on YouTube, and the most-searched person of 2010
Justin Bieber released My World 2.0 in March 2010, became the youngest solo male act to top the Billboard 200 in 47 years, and had the most-viewed video on YouTube by July. He was Google's third...
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...
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...
The torrent tracker that would not die
The Pirate Bay was the world's best-known BitTorrent index in 2010, a year after its founders were convicted in Sweden. Its pirate-ship logo, comment threads and "legal threats" page made it a symbol...
Every blog you followed, in one inbox
Google Reader was the RSS reader of choice for anyone who followed many blogs, with keyboard shortcuts, folders, and a Share button that made it a small social network of its own. In 2010 it was at...
The largest online art community
DeviantArt was ten years old in 2010 and the home of fan art, digital painting, photography and Photoshop brushes, with well over ten million members. Its green pages, "deviation" uploads and llama...
The blog that became a newspaper
The Huffington Post mixed aggregated news, celebrity bloggers and huge headlines into the busiest news blog of 2010, with comment sections in the thousands. Its traffic and Facebook-savvy strategy...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
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...
The droning horn of the 2010 World Cup, and the internet's loudest joke
The vuvuzela, the plastic horn that droned through every 2010 World Cup broadcast from South Africa, became a meme within days: browser extensions added a vuvuzela to any site, YouTube got a vuvuzela...
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...
Billboard's number-one song of 2010
"Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy" opened the biggest song of 2010. Tik Tok topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks and finished as Billboard's year-end number one single, the sound...
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...
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...
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...
m.facebook.com, WAP pages, and a web that did not fit
In 2010 the mobile web meant separate m.sites with stripped-down layouts (m.facebook.com, m.youtube.com), WAP pages on feature phones, and pinch-zooming full desktop pages on an iPhone. Responsive...
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...
Draw a line, watch the sledder ride it
Line Rider, the 2006 Flash toy where you draw slopes for a tiny sledder, was still a school-computer staple in 2010, and elaborate Line Rider tracks synchronised to music were a YouTube genre of...
"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...
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...
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...
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.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
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...
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.
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.
