The Top 10 Everything of 2009

TIME charts the highs and lows of the past year in 50 wide-ranging lists

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1. The Site that Ate the Internet

Facebook

Gilles Mingasson / Getty

Facebook just keeps getting bigger: The social network that started 2009 with 150 million members signed up No. 200 million in April, and by September it had amassed 300 million — an average growth rate this year of about 550,000 new members a day. And with that growth came new demographics: 71% of Facebook users now live outside the U.S., and many of them are older than the site's original college-age demographic. But even more surprising than Facebook's exponential popularity was the announcement that, for the first time ever, the company was making money. Not too shabby for a start-up run by a 25-year-old Harvard dropout.

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