>>853062
You actually weren't too far off. It was released in 2011, but conceived in 2009.
>The first concepts for GNOME Shell were created during GNOME’s User Experience Hackfest 2008 in Boston.[31][32][33]
>After criticism of the traditional GNOME desktop and accusations of stagnation and lacking vision,[34] the resulting discussion led to the announcement of GNOME 3.0 in April 2009.[35] Since then Red Hat has been the main driver of GNOME Shell’s development.[36]
The Gnome Online Accounts project was started in 2011 too.
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-online-accounts/commit/?id=0ef12aa003ad96634772a09d75a6f712b4e998d2