Meme: Ponies
Origin: TheTXI
Cultural Height: April 1st, 2009
Background: The pony meme began without fanfare early in TheTXI's time as a member of Stack Overflow. It's first recorded usages can be traced back to long running comment threads and arguments on both Stack Overflow and User Voice. The comment "I like ponies" would be randomly interjected and would inevitably lead to the thread getting completely derailed.
Before long it became evident that TheTXI was not the only SOpedian who found ponies to be the most wonderfullest things ever. It's popularity grew to the point where even Jeff Atwood and the SO Dev Team implemented the Cornify button on all questions and answers on April Fool's Day 2009. From there the popularity of ponies (and their magical weaponized form the unicorn) grew exponentially.
For April Fool's Day 2010, all Avatar requests were sent to Unicornify instead of Gravatar, resulting in every user having a personal unicorn for the day.
Related: http://www.ponyoverflow.com
Historical notes: In 2006 for April Fools, Slashdot switched to a pink ponies theme (screenshot). This subsequently lead to an "omgponies" slashdot meme.
