What is it about the year 2012?

2010

• 2010: The number of Internet connected devices-per-person grows to a ratio of over one. (1.84 - 12.5 billion devices vs 6.8 billion people.) Birth of the "Internet of Things".
• 2010: "Retail apocalypse." Mall visits decline by 50% between 2010 and 2013.
• 2010: Nearly 80% of cars are grey, silver, white, or black. (colorful cars, popular in the '90s, had been declining since the 2000s)
• 2010-2016: Number of smartphones sold rises rapidly before plateauing after 2016.
• Mar: Decline of forums around this time. (Google Trends)
• Apr: "Cord-cutting" movement. First year that pay television has quarterly subscriber declines.
• Apr3: iPad launch. Although initially criticized as a big iPhone, one million iPads are sold in half the time it took Apple to sell the same number of first-generation iPhones. It's noted that support for Adobe Flash is missing, which is a web standard. Google promises full support for Flash in the next version of Android.
• Apr5: WikiLeaks publishes a video titled "Collateral Murder", showing a leaked video of US soldiers shooting civilians from a helicopter in Iraq. WikiLeaks becomes a household name as the news reports on it. While visiting Sweden in August, Julian Assange is accused of sexually assaulting two women.
• Apr20: Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• Apr23: Police (Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team) raid the home of Jason Chen.
• Apr29: "Thoughts on Flash," an open letter by Steve Jobs criticizing Adobe's Flash platform, and explains why it would not be allowed on iOS.
• May: The YouTube 5 star rating system is replaced with likes and dislikes. 1 and 5 stars were the most common ratings.
• May20: Duke University, where Usenet began, shuts down it's Usenet server.
• Jun: The iPhone surpasses the Blackberry smartphone in sales.
• Sep23: Blockbuster files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
• Oct: The number of Blockbuster stores declines to 3425, compared to over 6500 at the beginning of the year (4000 in the US).
• Oct26: LimeWire is shut down by court order after a lawsuit with the RIAA.
• Nov28: US diplomatic cables leak by WikiLeaks. ("Cablegate")
• Dec3: Visa, MasterCard, Amazon, PayPal, and EveryDNS (domain), cut ties with WikiLeaks. The stated reason is that DDOSs against WikiLeaks had interfered with other users, violating terms of service. In retaliation bank websites are DDoS'd by Anonymous.
• 2010/Dec17-2012/Dec24: Arab Spring

2011

• 2011: 21 of the 50 highest grossing films this year are sequels, remakes, or franchise installments.
• 2011: US field production of crude oil rises rapidly after the introduction of fracking.
• Jan: Peak of world conventional oil production, however overall production rises from unconventional sources.
• Jan: Saturation of Netflix. (Google Trends)
• Feb: Launch of Silk Road, an online black market accessed through Tor.
• Feb15-Oct23: Libyan Civil War. Gaddafi government is replaced.
• Mar: Replication crisis in psychology
• Mar11: Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
• Mar11-19: Fukushima nuclear disaster.
• Mar15: Syrian civil war
• Apr: By this time half of Apple's revenue is from mobile sales.
• May: The United States becomes a net exporter of refined petroleum products.
• May2: Operation Neptune Spear
• May10: World of Warcraft looses more subscribers than it gains for the first time. (peak of 12 million)
• Jun6: Twitch is introduced as a gaming-focused spin off of Justin.tv.
• Jun15: First Chromebooks
• Jul4: News International phone hacking scandal
• Aug24: Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple due to his declining health, and is replaced by Tim Cook.
• Aug31: End of the Space Shuttle program.
• Sep14: Facebook adds a subscribe feature (one-way instead of two-way consumption of content) and news links gain more visibility in the feed. (beginning of the end of the friend-focused feed)
• Sep17-Nov15: Occupy Wall Street
• Oct: Windows 7 surpasses Windows XP as the most popular version of Windows worldwide.
• Oct5: Death of Steve Jobs.
• Oct19: Lowest point of public trust in Government, according to Pew Research. The number does not rise significantly past this point.
• Dec17: YouTube layout redesign, removing some customization and showing videos in a vertical feed on channels, optimized for mobile users.
• Dec17: Death of Kim Jong-il. Succeeded by Kim Jong-un.

2012

• 2012: Collapse of Blackberry phone sales.
• Jan18: SOPA protest by websites.
• Feb26: Trayvon Martin is shot by George Zimmerman in Florida.
• Mar-2013/Dec: Simplification of web design. Large "header" pictures and light themes. (March 2012, Adobe. July 2012, Digg. September 2012, Twitter. September 2012, Ebay. October 2012, Microsoft. January 2013, YouTube. June 2013, Apple. August 2013, Netflix. September 2013, SpaceX. November 2013, Steam. December 2013, Disney. March 2014, PayPal. April 2015, NASA. November 2017, Blizzard.)
• Mar9: YouTube changes its algorithm, rewarding minutes watched and frequency of uploads, instead of just number of views. (changes made to suggested videos, on October 12 the change is made to YouTube search) Animators suffer and lets players are rewarded.
• Apr: Chrome surpasses Firefox in browser usage.
• Apr: Yahoo is surpassed in popularity by YouTube and soon Facebook.
• Apr9-Sep6: Facebook purchases Instagram.
• May7: Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia.
• Jun5: Barack Obama and Joe Biden (VP) are nominated as the 2012 Democratic Party candidates. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (VP) are nominated by the Republican Party.
• Jun28: Adobe announces that it will not provide Flash Player support for Android 4.1.
• 2012/Jul-2015/Dec: Peak popularity of Tumblr. (Google Trends)
• Jul: Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices reaches 10% in the US. (StatCounter)
• Aug2-2013/Apr10: "Swatting" goes mainstream, there is a wave of celebrity swattings. (concept has existed since 2002)
• Aug16: Ecuador grants Julian Assange asylum. An office of the Ecuadorian embassy is converted into a studio apartment.
• Sep19: Release of iOS 6. Google and Apple's 5 year contract comes to an end, the YouTube app is removed and Google Maps is replaced by the controversial Apple Maps.
• Oct: Chrome surpasses Internet Explorer as the most popular browser.
• Oct26: Windows 8 is released. Metro design language. Overhauled start menu optimized for touchscreens with the desktop treated as an "app". Criticized for unintuitive swiping on desktops and inability to access all Windows functions without the desktop. Introduction of Metro apps distributed exclusively through the Windows Store (except for enterprise customers), many of which have less features than their Win32 counterparts. Users can log in using a Microsoft Account for cloud-features instead of a local account.
• Oct30: Disney buys Lucasfilm.
• Oct22-Nov2: Hurricane Sandy
• Nov6: Barack Obama and Joe Biden (VP) are re-elected.
• Nov6: Microsoft patent for using the Kinect to count the number of people in a room, restricting content to one user only.
• Nov15: Xi Jinping becomes head of the CCP.
• Nov18: Wii U launch.
• 2012/Nov27-2016: Growth of Amazon AWS. Netflix announces plans to migrate 100% of it's infrastructure to AWS.
• Dec14: Sandy Hook shooting
• Dec21: End of the Mayan calendar.

2013

• 2013: 2% of clothing in the US is made domestically (down from 51% in 1990.)
• 2013: 23 of the 50 highest grossing films this year are sequels or remakes.
• Jan11: Aaron Swartz commits suicide after being federally prosecuted for mass-downloading JSTOR articles at MIT.
• Feb: Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices reaches 20% in the US. (StatCounter)
• Feb10: China becomes the largest trading nation in the world, surpassing the US.
• Mar29: The first Oculus Rift Development Kit is released after a Kickstarter campaign.
• Apr3: LucasArts is shut down by Disney. Electronic Arts gets an exclusive license to publish Star Wars games.
• Apr11: Disney closes it's 2D animation studio.
• Apr15: Boston Marathon bombing
• May: YouTube "One Channel" layout update. End of customizable channels on YouTube. Several features are removed.
• May-2015/Aug: Adblockers rising in popularity. Banner advertising becomes less profitable across the Internet. (Google Trends)
• May2: Launch of Patreon.
• May20: Tumblr is purchased by Yahoo for $1.1 billion.
• May21: The Xbox One is publicly unveiled. Shown to require a Kinect, 24-hour check-ins, and restrict the reselling of used games. Due to backlash and advertisements from Sony made in response, these aspects are changed before launch.
• Jun6: Edward Snowden leaks PRISM, an NSA data collection program in cooperation with major companies.
• Jul: Following it's purchase by Yahoo Tumblr begins to filter content in nsfw blogs unless logged in. An analysis by TechCrunch on May 20 shows that over 22% of all traffic on Tumblr is pornographic.
• Jul17: Adobe Creative Cloud replaces Creative Suite 6 with a perpetual software license.
• Sep18: iOS 7 releases with a new non-Skeuomorphic design language, causing controversy. Within Apple, former designer Scott Forstall had been pushed out of Apple and his job replaced by Jony Ive, the designer of Apple's hardware.
• Sep24: Popular Science becomes one of the first major publications to shut down its comments sections.
• Oct2: Owner of the Silk Road marketplace Ross Ulbricht (alias Dread Pirate Roberts) is arrested, and the website is seized by the FBI.
• Oct17: Windows 8.1 is released, addressing criticisms that were leveled against Windows 8. The ability to start on desktop is added along with a start button.
• 2013/Nov4-2020/Jan23: Ads in Google search results are gradually redesigned become almost indistinguishable from results.
• Nov6: YouTube begins requiring that commenting on its videos be done via a Google+ account. Reply chains are broken, original ratings disappear, and older videos have missing comments. Downvoting disappears.
• Nov21-2014/Feb23: Euromaidan protests in Ukraine.
• Dec2: Growing consumer market for drones.

2014

• 2014: The ratio of contractors to U.S. military personnel has grown to 1.34. (reached 1 to 1 in 2009)
• 2014: In this year over 50% of Internet traffic comes from 35 websites. (150 in 2009) The top five are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Facebook. The "consumer Internet" represents over 50% of North American traffic. (20% in 2009)
• Jan9: The majority of congressional lawmakers are worth $1 million or more.
• Feb: Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices reaches 30% in the US. (StatCounter)
• Feb4: Satya Nadella replaces Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft. Focus on cloud computing.
• Feb20-Mar26: Russia annexes the Crimean Peninsula.
• Mar8: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappearance.
• Mar25: Oculus is purchased by Facebook for $2 billion.
• May13: Xbox One drops it's price to $400 and removes the bundled Kinect. Xbox sales begin to recover.
• Apr16: Sinking of the Korean ferry MV Sewol.
• Jun: YouTube bot purge. (developers fear an inversion where algorithms cater to bots instead of people)
• Jun: Operation Fox Hunt. Chinese covert operation to target Chinese dissidents living abroad, under the guise of returning corrupt Chinese nationals to face criminal charges. Over the course of six months 680 people are repatriated to China.
• Aug: CNN shuts down its comments sections.
• Aug16-Nov: Gamergate
• Sep26-Dec15: Hong Kong protests over proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. (pre-screening of candidates) Beginning of the Umbrella Movement.
• Nov7-20: Reuters and Recode shut down their comments section, saying that social media is a better place for discussion.
• 2014: By the end of this year Facebook is a "news machine" with trending, hashtags, and news outlet pages.

2015

• 2015: 24 of the 50 highest grossing films this year are sequels or remakes.
• Jan: Number of monthly active Twitter users begins to plateau, from April to May 2016 it's stock price drops 70%.
• Mar: Flat earth resurgence. (Google Trends)
• Apr21: Google boosts the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Sites that do not become mobile-friendly are hit with a 50%+ traffic reduction ("Mobilegeddon").
• Jun: Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices reaches 40% in the US. (StatCounter)
• Jun16: Donald Trump announces his candidacy for president.
• Jun23: Amazon Echo becomes available to purchase instead of invite-only.
• Jul: Popularity of Uber begins to plateau. (Internet middle-man economy) (Google Trends)
• Jul29: Windows 10 is released as a free upgrade to copies of Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. Updates become mandatory. (Windows 10 is described by Microsoft as being a "service.") On launch privacy settings are hidden in a submenu on startup. Ads in the start menu. Tech sites report that it will be the last numbered version of Windows, and instead updates will come out annually.
• Aug30-2019/Nov20: Netflix's movie library shrinks, older movies are removed and original TV shows are focused on instead. (2010, 7000 streaming movies on Netflix. March 2014, 6494. March 2016, 4335. November 20 2019, 3849.)
• Sep: The Coalition for Effective and Efficient Tax Administration is formed by Microsoft and other companies, with the goal of passing legislation that will defund the IRS, after the IRS comes after Microsoft for tax fraud.
• Oct: Peak of the European migrant crisis.
• Oct2: Google is restructured under a new public holding company named Alphabet Inc. It's slogan changes from "Don't be evil" to "Do the right thing."