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Showing posts with label 2010. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2010. Show all posts

The Best Tech Writing of 2010


Writing, whether it appeared in print or on a blog, was dissected, critiqued, relinked and shared faster than ever in 2010. Just take a look at the recent arguments on the Lamo/Manning Wikileaks chat logs between Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Wired's Kevin Poulsen that have spilled out from traditional columns to Twitter and back again. A New Yorker article from Malcolm Gladwell kicked off an Internet-wide debate on the efficacy of social activism through social networking, and discussion of the Internet's attack on our and ever-dwindling attention spans raged all year long. We took a look back at this year's most notable, controversial and challenging tech articles, picked some of our favorites and broke down the rest by privacy, entertainment, life and the Web, Web culture, people, business and gadgets. Fire up Instapaper or your favorite reading app and enjoy!

Top 15

Zadie Smith - Generation Why - The New York Review of Books
From the opening scene it's clear that this is a movie about 2.0 people made by 1.0 people (Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher, forty-nine and forty-eight respectively). It's a talkie, for goodness' sake, with as many words per minute as His Girl Friday. A boy, Mark, and his girl, Erica, sit at a little table in a Harvard bar, zinging each other, in that relentless Sorkin style made famous by The West Wing (though at no point does either party say "Walk with me"-for this we should be grateful).
Gladwell - Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted - The New Yorker
Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.
William Gibson - Google's Earth - New York Times
We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.
James Verini - The Great Cyberheist - New York Times
Gonzalez was debriefed and soon found to be a rare catch. Not only did he have data on millions of card accounts stored on the computer back in his New Jersey apartment, but he also had a knack for patiently explaining his expertise in online card fraud. As one former Secret Service agent told me, Gonzalez was extremely intelligent. "He knew computers. He knew fraud. He was good."
Glenn Greenwald - The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks - Salon
A definitive understanding of what really happened is virtually impossible to acquire, largely because almost everything that is known comes from a single, extremely untrustworthy source: Lamo himself.
Jaron Lanier - The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks - The Atlantic
Julian Assange, in defending his actions sees a vindicating contradiction in this difference: How can information be both dangerous and inconsequential, he asks? He sees information as an abstract free-standing thing, so to him, differences in perspective and circumstance mean nothing. This is how nerd supremacists think.
Maria Bustillos - Wikileaks and the Dangers of Hubris - The Awl
A closer look at these matters brings us to the real value of WikiLeaks. Over and above their oft-stated goal of scaring the bejesus out of any would-be misbehaving varmints in power is an even simpler and more valuable message for the public: don't believe anything you read. No seriously, not one single thing.
Jeffrey Zeldman - Stop Chasing Followers - zeldman.com
Following doesn't mean paying attention. You don't want numbers on Twitter, not really. What you want is to follow and be followed by human beings who care about issues you care about.
Thompson - What is IBM's Watson? - The New York Times
This, Wolfram says, is the deep challenge of artificial intelligence: a lot of human knowledge isn't represented in words alone, and a computer won't learn that stuff just by encoding English language texts, as Watson does. The only way to program a computer to do this type of mathematical reasoning might be to do precisely what Ferrucci doesn't want to do - sit down and slowly teach it about the world, one fact at a time.
Paul Graham - The Acceleration of Addictiveness - Paul Graham
The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.
Matt Richtel - Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - The New York Times
"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing," said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: "The worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently."
Robin Sloan - Stock and Flow - Snarkmarket
I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons-but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can't spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you'll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I've got nothing here.
Gary Kasparov - Chess Master and Computer - The New York Review of Books
At one point I realized that I was drifting into trouble in a game against one of the "Kasparov" brand models. If this machine scored a win or even a draw, people would be quick to say that I had thrown the game to get PR for the company, so I had to intensify my efforts. Eventually I found a way to trick the machine with a sacrifice it should have refused. From the human perspective, or at least from my perspective, those were the good old days of man vs. machine chess.
Ian Bogost - Cow Clicker: The Making of Obsession - Bogost.com
Even over the few days I spent developing Cow Clicker, I found myself watching people play, listening to feedback, and imagining changes. I "listened to my players" and made enhancements far beyond what was reasonable for a work of carpentry or a simple parody. It's hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game.
Beepo the Dolphin - Do The New Tablets Own Up To The Hype? - The Onion
Without further ado, let's get to the 800-pound gorilla of the bunch, the iPad. The device's unimaginative name belies its sleek, creative design, which is everything we've come to expect from Apple. It's pretty to look at, and they've worked out a lot of the touch-screen kinks that plagued the iPhone and iPod Touch. It's also much smaller and lighter than a laptop, making it easy to tuck under a fin when you're swimming out the gate, and thanks to Apple's dominance in the smartphone field, there will be thousands of applications for it.

Privacy/Security

Tim Elfrink - Hack Pack - Miami New Times
He'd betrayed the Secret Service and cost U.S. companies and credit card users big money. TJX alone lost 46.5 million credit card numbers and spent more than $132 million paying back customers, fixing security flaws, and defending itself in lawsuits. Banks, retailers, and payroll companies racked up "hundreds of millions" in expenses, prosecutors said.
Nancy Scola - Washington's I.T. Guy - The American Prospect
Given Obama's reputation as a our most tech-savvy president to date, and one whose election was due, in part, to online organizing, Malamud is betting that he can get this administration to see the wisdom in open-source government. His success or failure will speak volumes about whether Washington will reap the benefits of the Internet age -- or whether the current celebration of technology culture will simply fade away.

Entertainment

Nathan Heller - Trench Coat, Unlit Cigar - Slate
The two feeds are co-written anonymously by former Observer staffers Peter Stevenson and Jim Windolf, and although their semi-private joke has lately started going public-the Village Voice not long ago alluded playfully to Wise and Cranky; New York Magazine's "approval matrix" dubbed the latter "brilliant" and "lowbrow"-the two accounts are still essentially undiscovered. They shouldn't be. Whether one has a table at Elaine's or a stool in the local dive bar (or both), the Kaplan dispatches offer one of the most entertaining and ambitious uses of Twitter yet.
Tom Bissell - Video games: the addiction - The Observer
Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe. I do know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of that I have no doubt. I let this happen, of course; I even helped the process along. As for cocaine, it has been a long time since I last did it, but not as long as I would like.
Michael Heilemann - George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It's Okay - The Binary Bonsai
Chewbacca didn't spring to life out of nowhere, fully formed when Lucas saw his dog in the passenger seat of his car. That's the soundbite. A single step. The reality is complex and human. From vague names floating around, the kernel of an idea, changing purposes and roles of characters, major restructuring, the design hopping from person to person, scrapping the existing concept and going down a different path, seeing existing things in a different light and having to conform a range of ideas to complement and enrich one another.
Ricardo Gutierrez - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Technology - The Atlantic
But seriously, the music industry was the first to get hit in the switch to digital, that I can think of. Everyone at the top resisted. They couldn't see their industry going away, not after windfalls a few years prior. Even the studios couldn't imagine that they wouldn't be needed as much, seeing as it took so much money to record an album. Technology changed that.

Web and Life

Gary Wolf - The Data-Driven Life - New York Times
Adler's idea that we can - and should - defend ourselves against the imposed generalities of official knowledge is typical of pioneering self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quantified self resembles therapeutic ideas of self-actualization, even as its methods are startlingly different.
Megan Garber - Clay Shirky's "Cognitive Surplus": Is creating and sharing always a more moral choice than consuming? - Neiman Journalism Lab
Is creating cultural products always more generous, more communally valuable, than consuming them? And why, in this context, would TV-watching be any different from that quintessentially introverted practice that is reading a book?
Nathan Schneider - In Defense of the Memory Theater - Open Letters Monthly
What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects-the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives-is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.
Alex Balk - Is The Internet Making Us All Crazy Or Just Me? - The Awl
This is not obviously something completely exclusive to the Internet. We've all had the experience of stepping out of a car and suddenly realizing, "Wait, I just drove all the way home and have no memory of doing it." But there's a very different feeling to this one; it's almost as if my brain is creating my own avatar and putting it in a space which lacks the constraints of time or much physical detail.
Alexis Madrigal - The Man Who First Said 'Cyborg,' 50 Years Later - The Atlantic
Here's the thing: For most of us, cyborg ends at the human-machine hybrid. The point of the cyborg is to be a cyborg; it's an end unto itself. But for Clynes, the interface between the organism and the technology was just a means, a way of enlarging the human experience. That knotty first definition? It ran under this section headline: "Cyborgs -- Frees Man to Explore." The cyborg was not less human, but more.
Steven Pinker - Mind Over Mass Media - New York Times
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
Tom Meitzer - Social networking: Failure to connect - The Guardian
This love/hate relationship with social networking is widespread. Ablett's experiences echo those of many others who find they simply cannot live without Facebook. To sign off from its pages is to excise yourself from social groups and invitations, to vanish from friends' lives. So we get stuck in a vicious circle, compulsively checking each other's status updates and feeling alienated as a result.
Dan Ariely - Why online dating is so unsatisfying - BigThink
You have no time to create a social network. We work long hours, so it's really a system where we don't have time to find people for ourselves. It's taboo to date people at the work place, the social networks are weaker in the physical world. We move all the time and we don't have a yentl or parents to tell us what to do
Steve Lohr - Now Playing: Night of the Living Tech - The New York Times
Attention spans evolve and shorten, as even the most skilled media jugglers can attest. "I love the iPad," admits Mr. Negroponte, "but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through." And people, every bit as much as technology, shape the churning media ecology.

Web Culture

Farhad Manjoo - YouTube vs. Der Führer - Slate
David King, a YouTube product manager, told me that the system can find extremely fuzzy matches. It can spot when a copyrighted video has been transformed in some way by an uploader-for instance, it can finger a basketball game even if you pause, rewind, and then replay a clip from it, and it can identify Eric Cartman if you record a clip of South Park by holding your camera up to your TV.
Olia Lialina - Prof. Dr. Style - Contemporary Home Computing
Primitivity tells us the story of the browser being not only a browser, but also an editor. Every user of the early web was a producer of web content. Web pages were to be opened in the browser to look at them, but also to edit them, using existing pages as templates for new pages. The simple design of HTML made it possible for the first users to create state of the art pages with only four to five principal tags. The result was an extremely fast growing web. There were not many options, this is why we got many pages.
Coupland - A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail
In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness

People

Jose Antonio Vargas - The Face of Facebook - The New Yorker
Zuckerberg's ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet. Google and other search engines may index the Web, but, he says, "most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that's not out there to be indexed, right?" Zuckerberg was in middle school when Google launched, and he seems to have a deep desire to build something that moves beyond it. "It's like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what's going on with the people around you," he said.
Maureen Tkacik - Look at Me! - Columbia Journalism Review
What I'm talking about is, of course, a lot easier to do with the creative liberties afforded a blog-one's humanity is inescapable when one commits to blogging all day for a living. I don't think it's a coincidence that Andrew Sullivan, one of journalism's preeminent blogging brands, is one of very few journalists to have endured his own sordid sex scandal.
Robert Wright - Internet vs. Obama - The New York Times Opinionator
It's no exaggeration to say that technology has subverted the original idea of America. The founders explicitly rejected direct democracy - in which citizens vote on every issue - in favor of representative democracy. The idea was that legislators would convene at a safe remove from voters and, thus insulated from the din of narrow interests and widespread but ephemeral passions, do what was in the long-term interest of their constituents and of the nation. Now information technology has stripped away the insulation that physical distance provided back when information couldn't travel faster than a horse.
Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan - The Man Who Makes Your iPhone - Bloomberg Businessweek
It actually wasn't until late May, after the ninth Foxconn employee had leaped to his death, that Foxconn went into full crisis management mode, stringing more than 3 million square meters of yellow-mesh netting around its buildings to catch jumpers and setting up a 24-hour counseling center staffed by 100 trained workers.
Thomas Goetz - Sergey Brin's Search for a Parkinson's Cure - Wired
In Brin's way of thinking, each of our lives is a potential contribution to scientific insight. We all go about our days, making choices, eating things, taking medications, doing things-generating what is inelegantly called data exhaust. A century ago, of course, it would have been impossible to actually capture this information, particularly without a specific hypothesis to guide a researcher in what to look for. Not so today. With contemporary computing power, that data can be tracked and analyzed. "Any experience that we have or drug that we may take, all those things are individual pieces of information," Brin says. "Individually, they're worthless, they're anecdotal. But taken together they can be very powerful."

Business/Media

Tony Hsieh - Why I Sold Zappos - Inc.
These ideas about the power of our company culture had yet to be proved. As I talked to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who visited our headquarters in 2005, I realized that to Amazon, we were just a leading shoe company. If we sold, we'd probably be folded into their operations, and our brand and culture would be at risk of disappearing. That was why we told Jeff that we weren't interested in selling at any price. I felt like we were just getting started.
Devin Friedman - The Viral Me - GQ
Is that all social media is doing? Playing psychological video games in ways that form habits and drive revenue for Internet companies? Ashvin says no. And he points to Quora as an example of why this isn't the case. Quora actually does make you feel optimistic. It's a thingy that is meant to harness the collective knowledge of all the smart people who use the Internet and get them to answer human questions and provide nuanced human answers.
Jeff Simmermon - We're Launching ESPN3 and Streaming ESPN Online On October 25th - untangled
[L]et's call this thing what it is. It's the mother of all value-adds to the biggest audience of all: the screwing-around-at-work network. The entire Internet economy is built on simultaneously enhancing and destroying workplace productivity, and now that's going to a WHOLE new level.

Gadgets and Tech

Joanna Stern - RIM seems to be as lost as my BlackBerry - Engadget
Which brings me up to today. With my Curve lost somewhere between my hotel and San Francisco airport, a major industry question suddenly became very personal: a year and a half after buying the 8530, was there really no solid smartphone option in the market from RIM? Obviously, I knew the answers to that question -- I'm a tech editor after all -- but it wasn't until I saw Lazaridis speak a day later that I saw the writing on the wall for me and the company: RIM doesn't have a competitive smartphone now, nor will it have one any time in the near future.
Marco Arment - Great since day one - Marco.org
Neither Google nor the current Android device manufacturers embody the part of Apple's culture that allows them to release a great product on day one. They have a different pattern: It's always getting better. We're always supposedly one or two releases from it being really great.
Adam Greenfield - ultramapping - Speedbird
One relatively recent and very simple intervention, made possible by the lamination together of three or four different kinds of technology, has completely changed what a map is, what it means, what we can do with it. It's this: that for the very first time in human history, our maps tell us where we are on them.
Matt Jones - On the iPad - Icon
Take the best of what you understand of your readership and the decade or so that many magazines have spent on the internet and look to exploit the social technologies of the web, rather than run to present your content as an isolated recapitulation of a mid-1990s CD-ROM.
David Pogue - Looking at the iPad From Two Angles - The New York Times
The haters tend to be techies; the fans tend to be regular people. Therefore, no single write-up can serve both readerships adequately. There's but one solution: Write separate reviews for these two audiences.
Alexander Chee - I, Reader - The Morning News
A lover's e-reader just doesn't give off the same feeling of secrets and possible belonging in the way a bookshelf can. E-books will never be rare books or limited editions. It just isn't the point of an e-book.
Jane Hu - The Full Duplex Press: My Gmail Phone - The Awl
If soon we lose even the string of numbers that separates our abstract phone-identity from our physical selves, the phone will, once again, increase its pervasiveness and omnipresence. More and more, we move ourselves into an apparatus-a communication armor, owned and provided by corporations-that can send and receive messages at all times.
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The major incidents on the Internet in 2010

Internet Incidents



In what has become something of a yearly tradition, it’s now time for us to present 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet from this past year. As you’ll see, 2010 has been very interesting.
Just like previous years, we have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. If you’re an avid Web user, you are bound to recognize several of them. Let’s get started! The major incidents on the Internet in 2010 were…

Wikipedia’s failover fail

Wikipedia has become so ubiquitous that it can’t go down for a minute without people noticing. According to Google Trends for Websites, the site has roughly 50 million visitors per day.

In March, when servers in Wikimedia’s European data center overheated and shut down, the service was supposed to fail over to a US data center. Unfortunately, the failover mechanism didn’t work properly and broke the DNS lookups for all of Wikipedia. This effectively rendered the site unreachable worldwide. It took several hours before everyone could access the site again.

WordPress.com’s big-blog crash

WordPress.com got a pretty bad start this year when a network issue caused the biggest outage the service had seen in four years. The outage became extra noticeable not just because of the sheer number of blogs it hosts (at the time 10 million, now many more), but also because so many high-profile blogs use it. The WordPress.com outage took down blogs such as TechCrunch, GigaOM and the Wired blogs for almost two hours in February.

Gmail’s multiple outages

Gmail is one of the world’s most popular email services, and is an integral part of Google Apps. Unfortunately, it’s had several notable outages this year. These issues haven’t always affected Gmail’s entire user base, but enough of it to make headlines in the news.

In February, a routine maintenance caused a disruption that cascaded from data center to data center, knocking out Gmail worldwide for about 2.5 hours. In March, Gmail had an issue that lasted as much as 36 hours for some users. Another incident happened early in September, when overloaded routers made the service completely unavailable for almost two hours.

China reroutes the Internet

In April, China Telecom spread incorrect traffic routes to the rest of the Internet. In this specific case it meant that during 18 minutes, potentially as much as 15% of the traffic on the Internet was sent via China because routers believed it was the most effective route to take.

Similar incidents have happened before, for example when YouTube was hijacked globally by a small Pakistani ISP two years ago. Normally this results in a crash since the ISP can’t handle the traffic. However, China Telecom was able to handle the traffic, so most people never noticed this. At most they noticed increased latency as traffic to the affected networks took a very long and awkward route across the Internet (via China).

Even though no serious outage happened as a result of this, we think it’s such a fascinating disruption of the traffic flow that we felt it was worth including here. This is an inherent weakness of today’s Internet infrastructure, which largely relies on the honor system. Renesys has a more in-depth explanation of this incident and how it could happen. We should state that it wasn’t necessarily an intentional hijacking.

Twitter’s World Cup woes

Twitter seemed like the ideal companion to the World Cup (soccer to you Americans, football to the rest of the world, John Cleese explains it best). Tweeting about the World Cup proved so popular that it slowed down or broke Twitter several times during the weeks of the event. The upside is that this effectively load tested Twitter’s infrastructure, revealing potential weaknesses. As a result, Twitter’s service today is most likely more stable than it might otherwise have been.

Facebook’s feedback loop

Facebook has become a true juggernaut with more than 500 million users. That hasn’t changed its development philosophy, “don’t be afraid to break things.” This aggressive approach to speedy development has been key to Facebook’s success, but, well, sometimes it will break things.

Facebook’s worst outage in four years came in September when a seemingly innocent update to Facebook’s backend code caused a feedback loop that completely overloaded its databases. The only way for Facebook to recover was to take down the entire site and remove the bad code before taking the site back online. Facebook was offline for approximately 2.5 hours.

Foursquare’s double whammy

Foursquare’s location-based social network has been a resounding success and has in little time gathered a following of millions, so when the service went down for roughly 11 hours early in October, people of course noticed. The culprit was an overloaded database. And as if to add insult to injury, almost exactly the same thing happened the day after, taking the site down for an additional six hours.

Paypal’s payment problems

When Paypal stumbles, so do the many thousands of merchants that rely on Paypal to handle payments, not to mention the millions of regular consumers who use Paypal for their online payments. You can imagine the effect, and sales lost, if Paypal stops working for hours on end. Which was exactly what happened in October when a problem with Paypal’s network equipment crippled the service for as much as 4.5 hours. At its peak the issue affected all of Paypal’s members worldwide for 1.5 hours.

Tumblr’s tumble

Tumblr was (and still is) one of the great social media successes of 2010, but with rapid growth comes scalability challenges. This has become increasingly noticeable, and culminated with a 24-hour outage early in December when all of Tumblr’s 11 million blogs were offline due to a broken database cluster.

The Wikileaks drama

If you’ve missed this you must have been hiding under a rock, which in turn was buried below a mountain of rocks. The site issues that Wikileaks experienced during the so-called Cablegate were significant. First the site was the victim of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack which forced Wikileaks to switch to a different web host. After Wikileaks moved to Amazon EC2 to better handle the increased traffic, Amazon soon shut them down. In addition to this, several countries blocked access to the Wikileaks site. And then the possibly largest blow came when the DNS provider for the official Wikileaks.org domain, EveryDNS, shut down the domain itself.

Without a working domain name in place, Wikileaks could for a time only be reached by its IP address. Since then, Wikileaks has spread itself out, mirroring the content over hundreds of sites and different domain names, including a new main site at Wikileaks.ch.

As if this wasn’t enough drama, you have to add the reactions from some of Wikileaks’ supporters (not from Wikileaks itself). The services that cut off Wikileaks in various ways (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, EveryDNS, etc.) were subjected to distributed denial-of-service attacks from upset supporters across the world, which resulted in even more downtime. There was also collateral damage, when some attackers mistook the DNS provider EasyDNS for EveryDNS, aiming their attacks at the wrong target.


The Wikileaks drama is without a doubt the Internet incident of the year.

Final words:
The events we have listed here above really are just a small sample of everything that has happened in 2010. Even without Wikileaks, it’s been a very eventful year on the Internet. That said, this is something we find ourselves saying every year. The truth is that the Internet is not quite as stable and solid as most of us would like to believe. It’s a complex system, like a living organism, and things do break from time to time. Sometimes it’s small-scale enough that nobody notices, and sometimes hundreds of millions of people are affected.
Hopefully 2011 will be a less eventful year, but we wouldn’t count on it.

If you feel we missed something major, please let us know in the comments!

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75 Most Useful jQuery Plugins of Year 2010

We all know that another great year 2010 is coming to an end and 2011 is just ahead of us. 2010 was great for gadgets, technology lovers, web designers and developers. While we had seen some great gadgets, new technology, softwares launching this year and hope this trend will continue in the next year too.

If you browse internet regularly, you must have seen the trend of compiling end-of-the-year-roundups and many of sites already started posting round-ups of 2010. Well, I have a announcement for our readers that we are starting compiling end-of-the-year roundups from today. All these roundups will be best in the category and includes mostly free stuffs.

For the first end-of-the-year roundup, we have selected best jQuery plugins of year 2010 that enables you to create awesome animations and effects to your website. These jQuery plugins allows you to create stunning websites without having to much worry about accessibility issues.

All these jQuery plugins are listed here in a random way so that there will be some anxiety that what comes next! So, have a look on Guy's compilation of 75 most useful jQuery Plugins of year 2010. And stay tuned for more end-of-the-year roundups on our site.


1) jPhotoGrid : This plugin takes a simple list of images and captions and turns it into a grid of photos that can be explored and zoomed.

2) maxImage – jQuery Image Scaler : maxImage is a jquery plugin that automatically scales images based on how much room they have in the browser window. The image will always fill your browser window.

3) Picbox : Picbox is a lightweight (around 5KB) javascript image viewer which features automatic resizing and zooming of large images, allowing them to fit in the browser or be viewed at full size.

4) YoxView : YoxView is a free image viewer for websites. It’s written in javascript using jQuery and is available as a jQuery plugin.YoxView displays images above the website’s content, as a separate layer.

5) Spritely : Spritely is a jQuery plugin created by Artlogic for creating dynamic character and background animation in pure HTML and JavaScript. It’s a simple, light-weight plugin with a few simple methods for creating animated sprites such as the birds you see on the main page, and dynamic scrolling backgrounds.

6) FocusMagic : This plugin is meant to expedite the basic process of making form fields empty on focus and refill on blur, depending on a few specs. This solution focuses on accessibility as it does not remove the label, just moves it off the viewport. This way, if a user does not have Javascript, CSS, or uses a screen reader, they will still get normal labels.

7) jQuery Slider(Safari Style): jQuery Slider is easy to use and multifunctional jQuery plugin.
8 ) TopUp : TopUp is an easy to use Javascript library for unobtrusively displaying images and webpages in a Web 2.0 approach of popups. The library is jQuery and jQuery UI driven in order to maintain cross-browser compatibility and compactness.
9) jMultiselect2side : Multiselect (html select with parameter multiple=”multiple”) normally are very difficult to use. In this plugin, the select is double (double side select), the right one with the selected element, the left side for insert other element.
10) Pines Notify : Pines Notify is a Growl like notification plugin.
11) jQuery Google Charting : A jQuery plugin that sets a division to request a Google chart. In simple words, add Google Charts to your pages via a simple JavaScript interface.
12) jOla : This plugin help to add Ola effect on the text.
13) 3D Cloud Carousel : This is a fast and cross-browser implementation of a 3d carousel – looks very nice, more like a Flash implementation. It can create dynamic reflections underneath the carousel items, is accessible and degrades nicely without JavaScript. Easy to use as an unobtrusive plugin with lots of options.
14) bMap : This plugin allows you to quickly and easily add mapping to your website. It has been designed from the beginning to handle lots of markers, lots of layers, and custom marker icons. The internal Google object is exposed, so you can continue to use all of the power of the Google Maps API. You can also access the internals of the bMap object.
15) jQuery Path Selector : Path selector is a breadcrumb bar jquery plugin for selection of hierarchic options (similar to address bar of Vista’s Windows Explorer).
16) jqChromelessYoutube : This plugin embeds the Chromeless Youtube player on an element and plays videos from a Youtube playlist continuously. You can adjust the player’s size, the playlist ID, show/hide title,controls and playlist by passing parameters to the plugin.


17) Navit : Nav it is a great plugin which converts html lists into navigation. It has many options which include horizontal navigation, vertical navigation, accordion style systems, drop down menu systems and more.

18) Lens Flare : Far from being limited to Photoshop filters, video games and film CGI effects, a basic implementation of lens flares can work quite well in JavaScript too. This jQuery plugin allows you to add a lens flare effect to images.

19) jDoubleSelect : jDoubleSelect is a jQuery plugin to transform one select with optgroups into two selects, the first one with all groups and the second updated with the options of the group selected.

20) zWeatherFeed – Yahoo! Weather Plugin : This plugin will read the current weather for a location using Yahoo! Weather. It produces structured HTML with in-built CSS classes for styling. Simple and easy to use.

21) Table Highlighter : Simple plugin to highlight rows & columns to make the table easier to read.

22) jQuery Grid Animated Plugin : The Animated Grid Plugin is a simple bi-dimensional Grid. It was created to be the more flexible as possible to fit into your Html Structure easily without adding extra class. It allow you to manage easily the degradation if javascript is disable with two differents fields in the Css file.

23) Open Standard Media Player : The Open Standard Media Player is an all-in-one media player for the web. This media player is an industry changing, open source (GPL) media player that is built to dynamically deliver any type of web media, including HTML5, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flash.

24) zRSSFEED – RSS Feeds Reader Plugin : This plugin will read RSS feeds from any website url using the Google Feeds API. It produces structured HTML with in-built CSS classes for styling. Simple and easy to use.

25) zFlickrFeed – Flickr Feed Reader : This plugin will read Flickr photo feeds for a user and/or a list of tags. It produces structured HTML with in-built CSS classes for styling. Simple and easy to use.

26) jQuery Infinite Scroller : jQuery Infinite Scroller lazy-loads more and more articles from a location of your choice in order to allow infinite scrolling of a content list. For example, you may choose to display 10 articles when the page loads, but add a further 10 articles once the user has scrolled towards the bottom of the current list – and so on!

27) FS.Magnify : jQuery fsMagnify plugin is a simple plugin that magnifies the images over a certain ratio by clicking on them.

28) 3D Feature Image Carousel : This plugin rotates images in a three dimensional (simulated) carousel. Optionally, all images can have a description element attached to them that pops up on an overlay whenever that image rotates to the center.


29) JDesktop : Framework for making desktop-like environment in a web browser with very cool effects and animations.You can resize, minimize, maximize and drag windows and change windows themes.
30) Sliding Image Gallery : The idea behind this plug-in is to display a varying number of images in an attractive and easy to use manner. The SlidingGallery plug-in will take a group of images and turn them into a cyclical gallery of images which the user can click through. One image will be centered on the screen, with two smaller images off to the sides.
31) Pajinate – A jQuery Pagination Plugin : A jQuery plugin that reworks a list of DOM elements such that they are presented in a easy to navigate, paged manner.
32) Tiny Carousel : Tiny Carousel is a lightweight Jquery based carousel for sliding html based content. You can slide vertical or horizontal and it supports navigation by button or paging.
33) bgFade : This plugin allows you to duplicate the CSS:hover effect, along with some professional jQuery frosting on top. It’s as easy as :hover, but lets you do a whole lot more.
34) mb.MediaEmbedder : A jquery plugin helps you to show a movie from youtube, vimeo, flickr, livestream, ustream. Or to embed your audiopodcast (mp3 file) on your web page.
35) Narrative Select Plugin : A JQuery plugin to homogenize the select box (drop-down) appearance & interaction across modern browsers and OS.
36) jQuery Simple WYSIWYG Editor : Simple editor that comes with easy to customize look (including toolbar).
37) Autogrow Textarea : The Autogrow Textarea plugin is pretty straightforward. It allows textareas to grow as more and more text is typed in it.
38) TagCanvas : TagCanvas is a Javascript class which will draw and animate a HTML5 <canvas> based tag cloud.
39) Loupe and Lightbox : loupeAndLightbox is an image magnifier based off the use of two photography viewing tools: a loupe (or magnifying glass) and a lightbox. loupeAndLightbox uses a smaller image with a link referring to a larger version of the image for magnification effects. No other HTML is required! The .load() function is used for loading images, with error and success methods in place.
40) jQuery File Commander : If you are looking for comfortable files manager on your web serwer similar to Total Commander then you just found it. jQuery File Commander generate two panels with files and allows to make basic operations on them like copy, move, rename which are run on server files.
41) HoverAttribute : HoverAttribute is a jQuery plugin that allows you to make (link-)elements more dynamic by making an attribute of that element show up on hovering. This is foremost intended for <a> tags residing within full-width elements, such as headings or list entries.
42) BlogSlideShow : BlogSlideShow is a JQuery plugin that enhances your blog pages with fancy image viewer, which provides nice transition effects including CSS3/HTML5-related ones.
43) Magic Scroller : A Practical & Easy to Implement Plugin, this vertical scroll show elements with an elegant style using slice effect, creating a diferent perspective.
44) wdCalender : wdCalendar is a jquery based google calendar clone. It cover most google calendar features like Day/week/month view provided. It can create/update/remove events by drag & drop. You can easily integrate with database.

45) The Footer Plugin : This plugin ensures that the footer of your page always keeps itself at the bottom of the page. If the body height is less than the page height, the footer goes to the bottom of the page. Otherwise it remains attached at end of the content.
46) Dual Slider : A great option to have as a splash feature at the top of your site, highlights recent articles you want to advertise, that might have a nice graphic or even a video…basically anything you want. Plugin takes whatever your database has spat out and pulls it into an attractive dual animated slider. You are only limited by your own creativity in terms of styling or tweaking the animations to suit your needs.
47) jQuery DivGrow Plugin : The plugin will crop the container div to the initial height value and add a link to the bottom to expand it. When clicked the container wil expand to the height set in the div rel attribute (e.g. rel=”300″) and provide a click link to collapse it. The expand and collapse action are animated.
48) Popeye – an inline lightbox alternative : jQuery.popeye is an advanced image gallery script built on the JavaScript library jQuery. Use it to save space when displaying a collection of images and offer your users a nice and elegant way to show a big version of your images without leaving the page flow.
49) jQuery. Scratchie : jQuery Scratchie Scratchie is a fully-customizable scratchcard plugin. Define a background image and an overlay image or color and clicking and click and drag or just drag the mouse over the overlay to reveal the target image underneath.
50) Scroll Something : This is a plugin which helps you to scroll the images. To add a backround image to an item, you only have to put an image in the item. Just give the image a class called “itemBackground”.
51) Get user Facebook Albums and Pictures : getFacebookAlbums is a plugin that allows the user to connect on Facebook and choose a picture among his/her own albums. It’s an alternative to the simple upload form the hard drive disk.
52) JQF1 – jQuery FormOne Form Styling Plugin : jQuery FormOne is the most completer form styling plugin. Compatible with all browsers that allows you to change all attribute with a small coding.
53) AeroWindow : AeroWindow generates very cool Boxes in the Aero Style, inspired by the style of Window7.The popup window offers the usual options and full functionality similar to Windows windows.
54) jQuerynotice : This plugin allows you to show some notifications at the top of your website with just a simple line.
55) jQuery Easy Confirm Dialog : This is a jQuery based confirm plugin module that will act as the build in confirm-function in javascript but with the ability to style the dialog window. Only using built in jQuery and jQuery UI functions.
56) Sooperfish : SooperFish is an easy to use dropdown-menu plugin with total configuration control and clean code.
57) gSearch : gSearch is a lightweight jQuery plugin that helps you embed Google Search Results into your website. With only 2 KB in size it is very flexible and highly customizable.
58) Shadow Animation : With this jQuery plugin, you can extend the animate function to support the CSS box shadow-property. You can animate the color, the x- and y-offset, the blur-radius and spread-radius.
59) Twitterize : A simple jQuery plugin that allows you to create a floating div with the latest ‘n’ updates from someone. Optionally you can create a link to go to that user’s twitter profile.
60) GlobalMoneyInput : GlobalMoneyInput is a jQuery plugin to provide an easy way to input money values. All you need is to include. you can apply a mask to input localized money data based on Microsoft’s jQuery Global plugin.
61) jQuery News Ticker : An easy to use, slick and flexible news ticker in the style of the BBC News page ticker.
62) Canimate : If you’ve ever wanted to create an animation using a series of images for your website, but were forced to an alternative because you didn’t want to deal with the constraints of the GIF filetype, like color limit and difficult-to-deal-with FPS controls, then Canimate is the solution.
With Canimate, you can take any series of images and, using the Canimate naming convention, have them animate at any speed. You can treat the element that holds the image just like any other, including giving it borders, dragging it, etc.

63) jGallery : jGallery is a jquery plugin to on a elegant way expose all your images and galleries.

64) imagineMenu Plugin : imagineMenu is a jQuery plugin that lets you imagine all your *image menu* problems far away.
65) jQuery Touchwipe : The small 1 KB library allows you to obtain the wipe event on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch which can be used for example to scroll through an image gallery. It can also work for Android Touchscreens.
66) ezMark – Stylize checkbox and Radiobutton : ezMark is a jQuery Plugin that can stylize checkbox and radiobutton easily. ezMark uses an image replacement for checkbox and radiobutton. Unlike most other script which requires a lot of code, ezMark is very small (minified version is ~1.5kb) and it gracefully degrades.
67) Image Blur : This is little plugin for soft image blur effect on page load (and ‘clear’ on hover/rollover).
68) jQuery Mega Select List : The jQuery Mega Select List plugin converts a long drop down list into a more friendly navigational panel so items can easily be found and selected. This was designed to work with a hierarchy of items, i.e. with options organised into groups. If you have more options in your select list than you can shake a mouse at, use this jQuery plugin to help your website visitors to find what they need.
69) jQTwitter : jQTwitter allows you to display any user’s tweets in a list. You have the ability to set the number of tweets to display as well as the ability to display user’s images and set their size. The list is easy to style with some very basic CSS, as all the elements have their own class. Each twitter specific links are converted (ie. @ and #). Easy to use and to implement in your site.
70) jReelGallery : A jReelGallery is a small image gallery script based on the default OS window scrolling extended with easing. Supports scrolling, key events (e.g.: down and up arrow keys, home and end button). This plugin is highly customizable.
71) Illuminate with info balloon : When using the plugin you can highlight any kind of element on the webpage. You could use it for demo purpose. When you highlight an element, there is also an option to show a text balloon. It will appear next to the element. This text balloon can contain text and HTML!
72) List Ticker : Plugin to rotate list items inside an unordered list, plugin will automaticlly hide all but the first list items and then rotate them.
73) ShareIt : You can share any content on facebook or iwiw (or any other site you want) with this simple jQuery plugin.
74) Mobile drag and drop : This project aims to devise a drag and drop style interface with mobile device support.To be precise, most mobile devices “hijack” the action of dragging on the web browser in order to provide scrolling functionality, leaving your drag and drop items sat statically on the page. The idea behind this project is to create an example of drag and drop that works on normal desktop browsers, but also supports mobile devices.
75) Identicon5 : Draws identicons using HTML5 Canvas instead of the Gravatar image link. If Canvas is not supported the plugin defaults to the standard gravatar image link.
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