Ten years of technology: 2006

Chad Hurley - YouTube
Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's co-founders. Photograph: Linda Nylind Linda Nylind/Guardian



In technology, there was an awful lot of action - both at the hands-on consumer end of the spectrum and at the high-faluting, blue sky side of things: Blu-ray was launched; the PlayStation 3 came out; the latest Mars orbiter reached the red planet; Warren Buffett donated some $30bn to the Gates Foundation.

But what else was happening?


• Flush with profits from its ever-growing internet advertising empire, Google was on a bit of a rampage as the year wore on. It launched a ream of products - though whether Base, Google Finance, Video and artificial intelligence were successful is up for debate. The company did make at least one major breakthrough, however, when it splashed out $1.65bn to purchase YouTube in October.

• Google also brought another big issue into the spotlight in 2006: internet censorship in China. Just weeks after it was targeted by the authorities, Google decided to launch a censored version of its index. The backlash was significant, and by early 2007 the company admitted it had damaged its reputation (though it continues to provide the censored version to this day). Google wasn't alone, though: Microsoft caught flak for
closing down a blog criticising the government in Beijing
, while most notoriously of all Yahoo - which had been complicit in the jailing of dissident journalist Shi Tao - began to find itself the subject of legal action. In 2007, it apologised for its actions. He is still in prison.

• Closer to home, the BBC made waves by announcing what we called "radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos". One cornerstone of the concept? A rebranded video service called iPlayer - but also the idea of a sort of public service MySpace, which then-BBC digital boss said would let users "create your own space and build bbc.co.uk around you... [to] exploit the functionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia". Looks like somebody swallowed the Web 2.0 dictionary.

• With all that in mind, 2006 was clearly the year that social networking first hit the mainstream in a big way. MySpace was already in Rupert Murdoch's hands, but it turned out that a little-known site called Bebo was already proving more popular in Britain. Facebook, meanwhile, took one radical step - introducing its "news feed" of your friend's activities, which caused great concern and then (just weeks later) opening the site to anyone in the world, not just students.

• Picking out other major stories and trends was tough, but surely it's worth pointing out a landmark in digital music, as Gnarls Barkley became the first act to reach No1 on the basis of downloads alone. Little more than a month after digital sales were allowed to count towards the top 40 charts, Crazy - which was heard up and down the country all summer - hit the top spot... and unleashed a new sort of music buying behaviour into the wild.