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It has been described as the high-water mark of fun on the internet.
If you were alive and on the internet 10 years ago, then two words will remind you about something. Everyone was talking about 'the dress'.
The internet went crazy, not about something political or catching someone in a gotcha moment, but the controversy over the dress a Scottish mum wore to her daughter's wedding. Was it blue or gold or black or white?
It all started when BuzzFeed writer Cates Holderness posted a photo with the headline, what colours are this dress?
"One day in in 2015 I got a random message from a follower on Tumblr to the BuzzFeed account that just said, Hey, BuzzFeed, can you go check out this thing I posted, my friends and I are freaking out", she told RNZ's Afternoons.
"I had gotten that message in the middle of the day. I thought nothing about it. But towards the end of my workday, I went back, and I looked at the picture again, and it had gone from having maybe 500 notes, which are engagements on Tumblr, to having a couple of thousand notes. That's pretty rapid growth for a post on Tumblr.
"So, I turned to my colleagues who were sitting beside me, and I was just like, hey guys, what colour is this dress? And one of them said blue and black, and one of them said white and gold."
Within 20 minutes there were, two dozen people standing behind her desk "just screaming at each other," she said.
She realised this was something that might get the internet excited.
"I had figured if we're all yelling about this maybe the rest of the internet will yell about it. So, it was the end of the workday. I took five minutes to make a post on BuzzFeed, and then I signed off and went and hopped on the subway here in New York and by the time I got back to Brooklyn, when I got cell service, I had dozens of text messages.
"You need to check Twitter, and other people being like, you're ruining our lives. And I went to open Twitter to see what was happening, and I couldn't load Twitter because I was getting so many mentions per second that it would just crash my phone."
When she checked back in with the office, she learned the viral dress sensation was crashing the BuzzFeed server.
It was a moment in time, an one unlikely to repeat, she said.
"Everyone had a smartphone, finally, not everyone, but most people had a smartphone.
"They could pull up Twitter, it was kind of peak Twitter, peak social media, in a way that where, contrary to how things are today, 10 years ago, we were all on the same platforms, everyone was on Facebook, everyone was on Instagram, and everyone was on Twitter and so there was, I think, a larger captive audience and a unified social media experience. We're kind of fractured now."
Although only ten years' ago, it seems like a different age, she said.
"The internet, in so many ways, can be such a negative and depressing place, where we get our news, and it's just terrible.
"To have something as innocuous and silly and low-stakes as the dress being one of the most viral pieces of internet history, I think it's wonderful actually, I think it's we need more fun like that on the internet."
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