Here is our pick of 10 of the best website birthday celebrations including Twitter, Google and deviantART
5 Year Old Twitter
Twitter turned 5 years old this year, and the social media giant put up a new website to celebrate the occasion. The mini-site has 16 of their users from various fields including astronautics, politics, and entertainment, just to name a few. Some of the popular people listed were Snoop Dogg, Richard Branson, and Paolo Nespoli. They also put up a YouTube video featuring those 16 famous people talking about why they use twitter, and who they follow. It’s probably the only time you’ll see UFC President Dana White and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the same video.
deviantART 10th Birthday
If you’re an artist there’s no better place to show your work online than the great site known as deviantART. They celebrated turning 10 years on August 7th 2010. So how did they celebrate? Well, they rented out the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles! They really went all out with special appearances from some of their more famous website members, demonstrations, magic, Q & A sessions, food and drink, and art. For those who couldn’t make it to LA, they had lots of online events for users that week, ensuring that nobody was left out of the celebration.
Google’s 10th Anniversary
Google celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2008 with a 10th anniversary site, contests, and something called project 10 to the 100. The website gives people a nice timeline or what’s happened with the big G over the past 10 years, along with some great trivia about various events. They also pledged to give 10 million dollars to ideas that could change the world with their “Project 10″ contest. They awarded the money to five worthy projects with goals like free online education, enhancing science & engineering through education, public transport, education in Africa, and making government more transparent.
Lego Turning 50 in 2008
Lego’s have been around for ages, and children all over the world have spent countless hours building things with those colorful little blocks. Lego turned 50 in 2008, and the occasion was celebrated in several cool ways. From their website, they re-introduced a set that was five decades old along with putting out around 100 new items in the shop that day. The retro set was called the Town Plan; it was one of the first sets they produced, and is complete with 1950s retro style bricks. The founders of Google also paid their own tribute to the toy, by changing their logo on that day to a Lego styled Google logo! They weren’t even contacted by Lego to do it, they did it because they love the toy.
IMDB20
If you’re a fan of the movies, you’ve probably visited the popular site IMDB.COM many, many times. Not many people know that they’ve been around 20 years! In 2010 imdb celebrated their 20th birthday, and they definitely did it in style. They put up a special page called IMDb20 which had top lists, timelines, and all sorts of goodies from the past 20 years. In preparation for the big day they also started doing special interviews for the site with lots of A-list talent including people like Danny Devito, Kevin Spacey, Susan Sarandon, Kevin Smith, Josh Brolin, Oliver Stone, Roger Corman, and Will Ferrell.
YouTube’s 5th Birthday
YouTube celebrated its 5th birthday last year with what else, but a new video channel called YouTube Five Year. The new channel/page has a map view, video wall, and a “What is your YouTube story” section. Besides your average users, they even had a few famous folks chime in like Conan O’ Brien and Katie Couric.
The Facebook Virtual Mystery Gift
Facebook is by far the biggest social media site on the net, and they turned 5 years old in 2009. What did the social giant do to celebrate? They gave 150 million users a virtual mystery gift. Users were able to access the site’s gift shop, and send things like teddy bears or virtual pints of beers to friends. Considering how huge the site is, that doesn’t sound that exciting to me, and I’m sure other users thought the same. Hopefully they’ll do something huge for their 10th anniversary. I think Mr. Zuckerberg can afford it.
Wikipedia – The knowledge of the web for 10 years
Wikipedia is a true leader in the world of free Internet knowledge and the site turned 10 years old in January 2011. Wikipedia didn’t just go big; they went huge to celebrate the special occasion. Donors, supporters, and volunteers, from six continents hosted more than 100 different events all across the globe. They had a mini-conference in New York, a MIT & Wikipedia mystery hunt in Boston, documentary screenings in Mexico City, a two-day Hackathon in Amsterdam, and a charity BBQ party in Hong Kong just to name a few. They also put up a 10th anniversary wiki page that listed all the events, and gave users a chance to share stories and ideas about Wiki.
Blizzard – World of Warcraft – 4th Anniversary
Blizzard gave the players of their popular World of Warcraft game an odd (but fun) gift for the 4th anniversary of WOW a baby Polar Bear! Yup if you had an account open on that day in 2008, you got a cute little baby blizzard polar bear to follow your character around. It may seem an odd fit for to have a baby polar bear following around your Orc, but hey… who doesn’t like free stuff?
Birthday Concert For Amazon In 2005
Amazon.com had a big celebration to celebrate their 10th anniversary online. Hosted by Bill Maher, they had a concert with Bob Dylan and Norah Jones among others. That in itself is a pretty big deal considering Dylan’s Legend status, and both the singers’ numerous Grammy awards. It was also the only time Norah Jones performed a concert in 2005. This was just for members of the Amazon family, as tickets weren’t available to the general public.