This has been the year of the image—whether selfies, memes, pins or what-have-you. Social sites that emphasize pictures over text—Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr being the chief examples—hit it big this year, both in user growth and in the billion-dollar valuations investors lined up to assign them.
Prior to 2013, many folks considered the Visual Web a fleeting trend that wouldn’t stick around. Here are some of the newsworthy moments that convinced the tech world otherwise.
