Chicken Noodle Soup
Let it rain, and clear it out. "Chicken Noodle Soup" rode a Harlem dance from the block to grainy YouTube uploads to the Billboard charts — part of the first wave of dance crazes the internet taught America.
#Viral
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Early YouTube
The video platform that made viral content a daily ritual. YouTube launched in 2005 as low-res, ad-free, and gloriously weird—a space where "Lazy Sunday," "Chocolate Rain," and "Charlie Bit My Finger" became the lingua franca of internet culture.
Hot or Not
Upload your photo, get rated 1 to 10 by strangers, then rate a few hundred strangers yourself. Hot or Not was the web's first great time-waster of the 2000s — almost two million page views a day within a week of launch — and the founders of YouTube have said their site started out as an attempt to do the same thing with video.
Rickrolling
The internet's favorite bait-and-switch: click a promising link, get Rick Astley's 1987 "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead. Born on 4chan in 2007 and peaking in 2008, it's the prank that never really gave up.
Soulja Boy — Crank That
A 16-year-old self-produced a ringtone rap that conquered MySpace, YouTube, and every school talent show. The Superman dance was inescapable, the song spent weeks at #1, and nobody asked permission from traditional radio.
Terry Tate: Office Linebacker
"You kill the joe, you make some mo'!" Reebok's Super Bowl surprise dropped a full-speed NFL linebacker into a beige office to flatten anyone with bad workplace etiquette, and cubicle America never laughed harder. It aired on national TV exactly once — then became one of the first true viral video franchises.