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10. Flappy Bird
The mobile game – in which players try to fly a bird across basic obstacles – somehow combined stunningly crude design with fiendish addictiveness. The free timewaster, which attracted mainly twentysomethings furiously trying to outscore each other, became the best-selling app in January, three months after its launch. By January, when Flappy Bird was recording more downloads than YouTube, it was earning $50,000 a day from advertisements. But, wracked by guilt over the addiction he caused, Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen removed the retro-style game from all app stores the following month. It sparked a surreal bidding war for phones with Flappy Bird already installed. (REX)
From tiny elastic bands and the latest high-tech gadgets to debates, celebrities and a certain quadrennial football tournament, we present to you the biggest obsessions of 2014. By obsessions, we mean either new things that excited us or more longstanding trends that recorded a sudden spike in interest this year. The top 10 was composed by analysing Yahoo Search queries over the year on Yahoo UK and Ireland. Here’s the countdown from ten to one...