What did you people do before the internet?

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Bit late on this one, but I had to disagree with your point re: "Carry On Screwing" - whether the mystery of not knowing for sure if some cultural artefact existed might be fun, surely you can't be arguing that it's better to not know something than it is to know it. Think of it in the converse way - if the film existed, then Google would point you to ways to buy copies, or even to watch it on-line, within minutes. Thus the Internet is the most useful appilance & network ever conceived by humans. I don't know how you can criticise something for bringing you knowledge. It's like having a go at Encyclopaedia Britannica for daring to reveal how television works.

Oh yeah, absolutely - more knowledge is unquestionably a good thing.

I just wonder whether life is less exciting (in some respects) once you remove all the veils. Particularly when you're youn. What kept me curious about the adult world when I was a kid was the fact that I only saw glimpses of it - there was a thrill about pressing a radio to my ear very late at night and eavesdropping on a secret world. Preumably, in the age of Listen Again and podcasting, that's completely gone.

I sometimes sit in front of Google thinking 'What can I look up?' and my mind goes blank. Ditto download sites - I could conceivably get any record in the world delivered to me for free. It's thrilling now, and would have been even more so when I was 12...but what if I'd always had those things and took them completely for granted? Would the actual stuff have quite the same magic as a result?

I often wonder what my childhood would have been like had I grown up with Google. There'd have been less mythology, for sure, but then mythology is partly what makes things interesting.

[Beep Cleep Chimney]

Teletext.

I did that too.  I was addicted to Planet Sound, The Void, Digitiser and Megazine.

Hurrah, me too. Also used to read Josh's diary, a fictional account of a teen boy. His fictional sister had one, too. One of Josh's diary entries was about him having an 'enormous wig-wam under the sheets last night'. Whatever could he mean?

Christ, I remember that n'all!  Fackin' 'ell.

Whaddayamean "did"? I still see Planet Sound as my Bible!

Oh don't get me wrong, I still enjoy immersing myself in Planet Sound on a daily basis.  John Earls (Uber reviewer of the weekly single and album releases) is a bit of a legend in my eyes.  Although, sadly, I'm old enough to remember when their music review letters page was called Blue Suede Views .

 I just meant Josh's Diary takes me back a bit.

[Pinball]

Pre-Internet I used to subscribe to a lot of newsletters. Seems so quaint now.

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

So does Play-by-Mail!

[Timmay]

It's not quite the internet, so I think it counts, but I used to dial up to and download porn from bulletin boards on a crappy 1,200bps modem. For some perspective for non-computing whores, broadband connections in the UK are usually between 500,000bps to 8,000,000bps.

You had to dial-up to the server itself, which meant dialling a national call usually. I ran my parents bill up to over £200 one month. I didn't tell them what I downloaded from it.

[Barney Sloane]

Teletext.

I did that too.  I was addicted to Planet Sound, The Void, Digitiser and Megazine.

Hurrah, me too. Also used to read Josh's diary, a fictional account of a teen boy. His fictional sister had one, too.

Was his fictional sister called Debbie, by any chance?  Seem to remember reading a fictional diary which went on about her brother 'spending a bit too much time in the toilet'.

[JesusAndYourBush]

It's not quite the internet, so I think it counts, but I used to dial up to and download porn from bulletin boards on a crappy 1,200bps modem.

Just out of interest, what type of computer were you using for that?

Was his fictional sister called Debbie, by any chance?  Seem to remember reading a fictional diary which went on about her brother 'spending a bit too much time in the toilet'.

Yeah, "Debbie's Diary", I remember that.  I think they were updated on alternate days (or every few days, however often they were updated).

[Timmay]

It's not quite the internet, so I think it counts, but I used to dial up to and download porn from bulletin boards on a crappy 1,200bps modem.

Just out of interest, what type of computer were you using for that?

An Amstrad PC2086/30 - 8MHz 8086 processor, 640k RAM, 30MB hard drive.

[Boing]

I used to read and experience life and believe MY life was worth something before the internet,lol,woot,kudos,imho,just my 2 cents worth.

[Mister Cairo]

I used to read and experience life and believe MY life was worth something before the internet,lol,woot,kudos,imho,just my 2 cents worth.

I still do this though I have the Internet, why can't you.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Debbie's/Josh's Diary were on the 'Buzz' teen pages on Oracle, the ITV teletext. I think they were written by Buzz editor Gareth Herincx. After a while, they became a post-9pm thing after complaints from parents.

[meestermole]

I sat in front of an empty building until it became a cybercafe.

[the midnight watch baboon]

Debbie's/Josh's Diary were on the 'Buzz' teen pages on Oracle, the ITV teletext.

I'm sure they were on Channel 4's teletext service. Or am I?

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Yeah, but wasn't C4 teletext owned by Oracle?

Buzz disappeared when Oracle disappeared anyway.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Oracle ceased to be in 1992. After that, ITV & Channel 4's teletext was called (rather unimaginitively) Teletext.

http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/timeline/

[TraceyQ]

I had two kids. 'Nuff said.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Anyone read the piece in today's Guardian Weekend magazine about 'Web 2.0'?

Apart from featuring a photograph of some second-generation dotcom millionaires smashing old-school monitors with hammers (the sight of which would make any sane person want to join Amish immediately), it ended with the troubling image of a typical internet user: completely alone, yet feeling at the centre of the universe. Self-centred cunts with the illusion of a 'community'. The article ruminates on how children who have never known a pre-MySpace world may well have a totally fucked view of what life is like.

Here, anyway:

A bigger bang

The second internet goldrush is in full swing, and this time it's all about real people, creating, editing and showcasing their own lives and opinions. John Lanchester gets to grips with the virtual universe and Guardian writers interview the smartest and the luckiest entrepreneurs who demolished the old internet and built a brand new one

In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch had what was widely seen as a brain-fart. He spent $580m on an internet company that was only two years old. The company was called MySpace and it was the fastest-growing new example of what are called "social networking" sites: a place where young people could post pictures of themselves, solicit friends to get in touch, let people listen to their music, answer pointless questionnaires, and in general go on at great length about the favourite subject of every young person on the planet: themselves. The company was seen as a fad by the few grown-ups who knew about it, and was notorious among geeks for its horribly irregular site design. It had no revenue stream to speak of. The "business model" for the company - the way it was eventually going to make money - was ... er ... next question. There was widespread tittering. Murdoch, who lost a lot of money on the first cycle of internet hype, had bought another pup.

In August, MySpace, which on various measures is now the busiest internet site in the world, signed a deal with Google guaranteeing it $900m in search-related advertising revenue over the next four years. Murdoch has made some big mistakes with his big bets, but MySpace isn't one of them. Instead, it is the exemplar of a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new technology as on the way people are beginning to use existing technology. It is, I think, significant that the co-founder of MySpace, Tom Anderson, is what used to be a rarity in the net world, an arts graduate, with, instead of the computer science PhD that would once have been de rigueur, an MA in, of all things, film criticism.

"Technology," a sage once observed, "is stuff that doesn't work yet." That sounds like a joke, and it is, but it is also a crucial truth about what technology is and does: we perceive something to be technology only when it is still new and, like most new things, not quite working the way it's supposed to. Nobody thinks that the wheel is technology, though it's as important a piece of technology as humanity has ever invented; the book is an unimprovable masterpiece of technology, and relies on another, arguably the most consequential piece of technology there has ever been, the alphabet. But because you don't often find yourself waiting 45 minutes on a helpline trying to connect to Alphabet Technical Support in Bangalore, you probably don't think of the alphabet as a piece of technology.

It is when people stop thinking of something as a piece of technology that the thing starts to have its biggest impact. Wheels, wells, books, spectacles were all once wonders of the world; now they are everywhere, and we can't live without them. The internet hasn't quite got to that point, but it is getting there. People around my age - I was born in 1962 - can remember with great clarity the first time they saw a colour television. (In my case it was in 1968, in, of all places, Harrods. Another period detail is that my parents had taken me there to buy a dog.) That means we had grown up with enough black-and-white TV for it to seem the norm, so that the new thing was an extraordinary marvel. People about 10 years younger than me don't know what I'm talking about. For them, TV was never black-and-white and colour pictures were never a miracle. Similarly, younger internet users who have never heard the whistling, chattering, hopeful-anxious sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. For them, increasingly, the net is something that is always available, has always been there, and can be accessed anywhere and at any time. Wireless modems, and the omnipresent internet they permit - the internet that is everywhere, like the air - still seem miraculous to me, but to 10-year-olds they seem utterly prosaic.

People are growing up with the internet, and the internet is growing up with them. It is evolving. Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, "email's main function is as an instrument of torture". In civilian life, I increasingly notice that people don't actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past. No one could have predicted that, just as no one could have predicted the extraordinary, dizzying multiplying of the number of blogs being written. (I don't say read.) That number has been doubling every six months for the past three years: there are now, as of July 31, more than 50m blogs on the internet; 175,000 new blogs are created every day - that's two every second. The dominant languages (they jockey from month to month) are Chinese, Japanese and English. There are 1.6m blog posts a day.

What does that mean? What should we think about it? It's hard to know where to start, other than to say that those figures are from Technorati, a blog-tracking and searching website that is one of the indispensable sites for anyone with an interest in the net. What is a typical blog? Who knows? Somebody wittering about what they had for breakfast, or complaining about their boyfriend, or posting terrible photographs of their dog, or how they played Pong last night and it was more fun than some of their new games, or how lousy it is being a policeman, or the sex life of an American expatriate in China. (That blog, Chinabounder, has caused a national scandal in China, and spawned a hunt for the blogger that is itself the subject of a blog, Who Is Chinabounder?) It's almost impossible to think of a subject that isn't being blogged about.

The shorthand term for what is happening now is "Web 2.0", a designation coined at a conference in 2004 by the web-business booster Tim O'Reilly, as describing "an attitude rather than a technology". The phrase is a shorthand for the second internet goldrush, to follow the one that ended in 2000 with arguably the biggest destruction of investors' capital in history. From the business point of view, the defining feature of this new goldrush is that established companies are throwing huge amounts of money at upstarts who have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is provided by their users. Thus we have Murdoch's buy of MySpace in July 2005, Yahoo's of Flickr in March 2005 and its rumoured to be imminent buy of Facebook for around $1bn, and - in money terms the biggest of them all - Google's $1.6bn acquisition of YouTube on October 9. That's a great deal of money raining down on some happy, happy nerds. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen only founded YouTube in February 2005. Their creation has grown in value at a rate of more than $100m a month - which must surely be a world record. That's a hell of a lot of money to be earned by the founders of a company with no earnings.

What all these new kind of sites share is an approach to creating things: "user-created content", in the jargon. The internet is no longer about corporations telling you what to do, think or buy; it's about things people create. The stuff they create falls into two very broad types. (The types aren't distinct; they blur and overlap and mash-up, as is the new way of it.)

The first type is the collective or collaborative gathering of information. One of the most important examples of this came in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when survivors were dispersed all over the place, information was chaotic and contradictory, and the government, temporarily, seemed to collapse. A group of net-heads, led by a hacker called David Geilhufe, realised that scattered information was being posted to blogs and news sites, and put together a team of thousands of volunteers to "screenscrape" this information off the net and amalgamate it in one place: Katrinalist.net, which within a single day had collated information about 50,000 survivors of the disaster. No other medium could have done that, and no government agency came close to having the nous.

The collaborative aspects of the net have tremendous power to gather and collate information. Wikipedia is one example of this: the biggest and fastest-growing encyclopedia on the net, and the subject of many horror stories on the part of what bloggers like to call the MSM (that's mainstream media, like this). Wikipedia-bashing is all the rage in the press, and there's no denying the encyclopedia's flaws; but it's also a reference resource of extraordinary range and ease of access and, when the subject involved is sufficiently uncontroversial, remarkable usefulness. The rule of thumb with Wikipedia is that the more nerds argue about an entry, the less useful it is. (Incidentally, in the American university system, any use of Wikipedia immediately guarantees the student an F.)

Another collective site - one I look at every day - is Digg, in which users click on a thumbs-up to vote for interesting stories. Digg, Wikipedia and comparable sites have just been the subject of a blistering essay by Jaron Lanier, a scientist-thinker-mountebank who invented the term "virtual reality" and whose essay in Edge, an online magazine, complains about "Digital Maoism" and the tendency of these sites to form a "hive mind", a collective, consensus reality. And there's something in that: in any arena of human activity, you don't get a spiky, idiosyncratic take on things from sites where people vote for the most popular anything. But you do get a sense of what people find interesting, what they're reading about and talking about; a lot of what is on there is interesting and funny, and anything boring and/or stupid can be quickly scanned and rejected. The ease and speed of not-reading is one of the good things about reading on the net.

If collective sites are one of the big categories of New Thing, the other is to do with personal sites - what have been called "Me Media". But the distinctions are not clear-cut, and some interesting things happen in the overlap. Del.icio.us is a bookmark site where people list favourite places on the web - sites, blogs or whatever - which makes it a personal thing, but the entries can be tagged (ie, they can have subject labels attached) by anyone who looks at them. This gives Del.icio.us a flavour that is both personal and collective: it's about individual likes, as viewed in a group perspective, or something. I find I use it most when something else on the net sends me there, and I become curious about what someone who's interested in the same things as me finds interesting. Flickr is another site in this personal/collective overlap. It's a place where people post and tag photographs, often with multiple categories: so, say, a photo of a woman in a bikini on a beach in Brazil might be tagged as "beach", "bikini", "Brazil", and "whoa baby". I don't fully understand why people are so keen to post private photographs to Flickr, or why people are so keen to look at other people's photographs, but that's just me. Millions do.

YouTube is a hugely popular site that is more firmly in the personal category. It is basically a huge clearing house where people can post videos of, well, of anything. Want to film yourself standing on one leg, and let strangers see the result? YouTube! Then everyone who views it can vote on its popularity - that's the collective touch. Quite a lot of YouTube is pilfered off the TV: the point at which the site became a household name in the US was when it rebroadcast a sketch called Lazy Sunday from Saturday Night Live. NBC forced them to take the footage down, but the resulting publicity turned YouTube from a geek favourite to a general favourite. Because anybody can put anything (except porn) on to YouTube, I'd say roughly 98% of it is so boring that it rivals prescription sleeping aids, but the other 2% still adds up to a lot of stuff. At the time of writing, the most popular thing on YouTube is Peter, a 79-year-old man from Norfolk, complaining about modern life. His unique selling point is that he is the oldest person on YouTube. Peter is like a nicer, duller, less funny, less incisive version of Victor Meldrew. People love him.

We are now firmly in the category of the personal site. One way of putting it is to say that collective sites are useful (except when they're not) and personal sites are interesting (except when they're not). The big daddy of these, the 900lb gorilla, the Godzilla, the current Biggest of Big Things, is MySpace. Readers of the business pages first heard of MySpace when Murdoch bought it in 2005, and the site forced itself into the consciousness of the wider public over the past year, mainly through the MySpace-powered breakthroughs of three musical acts: Gnarls Barkley, the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen.

That was no accident. Music made MySpace what it is today. At the time the company launched, in 2003, the then biggest social networking site, Friendster, didn't allow bands to promote themselves. The men behind MySpace saw that as a crucial mistake, not least because of music's centrality to young people's self-definition. Bands gave them a reason for visiting MySpace, and something to talk about when they went there. "Music is a major cornerstone of our success," Tom Anderson says today. "We've got over two million bands on the site already and the number just keeps growing. As other artists - comedians, film-makers, designers, etc - have come on the site, the success we've seen with music has repeated itself. If you're connected to culture and offer compelling content, you can reach broad segments of our community pretty fast. That's true if you're Snoop Dogg or an unsigned garage band in Liverpool."

Cool - everything to do with cool - is a big, big business. MySpace is in that business. It has more than 110m registered users; if it were a country it would be the 10th biggest in the world, just behind Mexico. Its audience, heavily skewed towards the affluent youth of the west, is a marketer's and advertiser's fantasy. In time, this might be a problem for MySpace, as companies become more astute about how to manipulate the apparent chaos and spontaneity of the site to plant manufactured hype. (There has just been a kerfuffle of this sort on YouTube, about a fake video blog called Lonelygirl15.) Chris DeWolfe, the CEO of MySpace, was bullish about this when I asked him. "'I'm not sure how anyone could falsely construct hype on MySpace," he said, "since the community rejects pretty much anything that isn't authentic." Well, quite - and they might decide that MySpace itself is not wholly authentic. But although there are murmurings about hype, for now, the site is riding high. "If you're not on MySpace," an American teenager told a researcher, "you don't exist."

The hardest thing to get your head around is the sheer size of this audience. When you first browse MySpace pages, the site asks what country you're interested in, which gender, what age range, and whether you want only to see people who've posted photographs of themselves. If you leave all of those settings on the default options, you are taken to see the MySpace pages of women in Afghanistan between 18 and 35 who have posted pictures of themselves. Guess how many there are? Three thousand. I thought that was a mistake - what, 3,000 women peering out from beneath their burkhas in Kabul to post complaints about their mothers-in-law? - but when I started clicking, I landed first on the page of a 18-year-old woman who is a private in the US army and based at Bagram. That's when I realised that most of these pages belong to young women soldiers, and also what MySpace is: a place where you can go to communicate with, if not quite anyone in the world, then with an 18-year-old US army private who likes Sixpence None The Richer, Eagle Eye Cherry and the Ramones, has a weakness for deli pickles, a fear of snakes and whose ambition for this year is to achieve abs of steel. And there are 100m more pages where that one came from.

There is something freaking-out about this. It's hard to know what to think of a phenomenon where quite so many people are so on display, so contactable, so ready to be got in touch with, so connected. Speaking for myself, I feel a strong sense of intrusiveness when I look at people's MySpace pages - a reaction that makes no sense at all, since the whole point of these pages is that they've been designed to be looked at. While I've been working on this piece, I've been showing MySpace to people who don't know it and asking what they think of it, what it reminds them of. One of the best answers was given by my wife, who said it reminded her of scrapbooks, the kind that teenagers used to keep - postcards, photos, lists of likes and dislikes, doodles, best friends, boyfriends, crushed flowers, crushes. But while all that is true, the truest thing is to say that you can't really come up with a metaphor for MySpace. It really is a new thing.

This has, of course, caused a moral panic. Like most moral panics these days, it is about paedophilia. In the US, there are court cases from people who've been bullied online, and there's a bill targeting MySpace before Congress, under the lumpen name of the "Deleting Online Predators Act". And I suppose there's something in this; certainly there's no way of knowing if people are who they say they are. But it should also be borne in mind that teenagers, in particular, need a place where they can try out identities and experiment with different versions of themselves. MySpace has more then 4m registered users in the UK, and logged more than 1.6bn page visits in June. A great deal of that traffic, perhaps most of it, comes from teenagers - a fact that surely reflects the diminishing opportunities for teenagers to meet and interact in real life. A lot of what goes on on MySpace is that, to non-teenagers, extraordinarily hard-to-understand activity of hanging out. What's going on? Nothing's going on. That's the point.

The usefulness of this for young people is not small. A friend firmly interrupted me when I was talking about the MySpace moral panic. Her children are devotees of Bebo, a site similar to MySpace but based around schools and colleges. "Leila had some friends over from her school. She's 13 and Tom is 11, and that's a difficult gap when the girls are older than the boys, so I was worried. But when they came over they hit it off immediately, because they already knew all about Tom from Bebo, what bands he liked and so on, and he already knew who they were, and they immediately began talking and they never stopped, and there was no awkwardness at all. It was fantastic. Especially compared with what it used to be like to be a teenager. I feel as if I spent the second half of the 70s trying to make conversation with boys who felt even more awkward than I did - thanks to the net, you just don't have to do that any more."

Perhaps the more genuinely worrying thing is the opposite of the one the moral panic is about. I said MySpace is all about connectedness; but equally, and perhaps more truthfully, it could be said that it's all about separation. In 2000 a man called Mitch Maddox changed his name by deed poll to Dotcomguy and lived for a year without going out of his house: all his shopping, all his everything, was done exclusively over the internet. That was a stunt, obviously - a rather depressing stunt - but it made the point that this is what the world is now like. (In case you're worried, he changed his name back to Mitch Maddox at the end of the year.) You can make your living, do your shopping, pay your taxes, enjoy your entertainments, have friends and relationships, all without going out of your house, or indeed without moving away from your computer screen except to go to the fridge and toilet. Now that, it seems to me, is a profoundly grim thought.

Tom Anderson doesn't agree. "For most of our users," he told me, "the vast majority of their MySpace friends are also offline friends. They're just connecting through a different medium when they're on MySpace. The connection between someone in Leeds and a comedian in Los Angeles would probably never happen if it weren't for MySpace, so it enables friendship and connection far more than it limits it." Pressing the point, I asked if the MySpace idea of a friend represented a devaluation of the idea of friendship. Again, he didn't agree. "It's pretty cool when you can connect directly with your neighbour and the Black Eyed Peas at the same time. MySpace gives our members the ability to reach such an incredible range of people and have direct contact with them. I'm not sure how that devalues friendship so much as it expands the range of potential friends you can have."

Well, maybe. About five years ago I was checking my email in a cybercafe in Sydney. Being nosey, I began sneaking discreet peeks at my neighbours' computer screens. On my left, an American backpacker was writing to a man she'd met in India, debating whether they should arrange to meet again and take their relationship further or whether they should leave it as it was, as a Bogart-and-Bergman we'll-always-have-Dharamsala memory. On my right, a man in a turban was writing to a woman not his wife about how his wife did not understand him. It struck me that everybody on the net is sitting alone at a computer screen, and many of them are wishing they weren't alone, while also, often, in some deep way, preferring that they are alone and being nervous of the alternative. Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have "friends", which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them. This is our first glimpse of what people who grow up with the net will want from the net. One of the cleverest things about MySpace is the name.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I don't think that article says anything most of us haven't already considered. I don't know why it deserves recognition just because they've obviously spent more than an hour thinking about it. Even it is is surprising to come from the Guardian Weekend.

It's annoying that the editorial is forced through the synapse of their supposed main 'Guardian reader audience'. Middle-age, middle-class, not neccessarily knowing about internet trends. It feels a bit like those movie countdowns where Emily Booth explains the plot of a film you love really badly.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

I don't know, I find that quite refreshing really - I hate the assumption that everyone knows what current internet fads are and how they work. I bumble through the internet, myself, vaguely knowing how some bits work, but not really knowing what I'm doing. So I appreciate the world-weary approach.

Mind you, I do work under the assumption that everybody in the world knows more about computers than I do.

[chand]

Everyone who reads the Guardian should know what all the internet fads are, The Grauniad is the one paper that never stops banging on about the internet and how important it is and blah blah blogs etc.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

The individual 'brat pack' type profiles are even worse, though, especially the incredibly punchable couple who invented Flickr. Try and read their comments below without wanting to scream 'OHFUCKOFF' very loudly in their faces.

Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, founders of Flickr.  

A little while back, a friend of Caterina Fake's split up with her boyfriend. And what was worse, she told Fake, her ex was rubbing salt into the wounds by uploading pictures of himself having a great time at parties on Flickr, the website Fake set up with her husband Stewart Butterfield. The story illustrates the way that in the space of barely two years the photosharing website has become a part of everyday online life for millions of people . Every day more than a million photographs are uploaded to the site joining 250m other sunsets, seascapes, cheesy grins and just about everything in between.

For a whole generation, Flickr has become simply what you do with your pictures. The result is that Flickr has evolved into a giant, constantly updated snapshot of the planet. This is not what the couple had in mind when they began developing a so-called 'massively multiplayer online game' in 2002. But when their programmers developed photo-sharing software as part of the game, the couple decided it might be a business in its own right. 'We kind of stumbled into a good thing, ' Butterfield says.

Barely a year after launching Flickr, Fake and Butterfield sold it to Yahoo, reportedly for more than $30m. They are constantly surprised by the ways in which the site has been shaped by its users. 'We initially had a feature called groups where you could form groups around interests, ' Fake says. 'We anticipated it would be used for things like high school reunions, weddings, birth of a baby , conceivably nature photography ; but people made these groups around fascinating subjects we would never have thought of; made groups for just art projects. There's a group called 'What's in my bag? ', where people will take everything out of their bag and, like, spread it over the floor and label each of the items and tell a little story about it.'

What is web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is like a return to the web's roots. When everyone first got to be online, the thing that was really magical about it was that you could suddenly have these conversations with Danish Borghese scholars in the middle of the night because they happened to be online. What's changed is expanding on that theme of communication and personal publishing and making it available to millions of people who don't have technical skills . '

What is your big idea?
The photo-sharing sites that existed had as their paradign photo albums . Flickr came along and had the idea you no longer had an album, you had a photo stream.

What is the next big thing?
You're going to start seeing much more of the web off the web. Things that are not intended to be consumed on the web but work on your mobile devices, on your PDAs, transportable with you everywhere. The web will be something you return to to do the heavy lifting of your computation, but for the most part you're going to have very light devices.

[gazzyk1ns]

You're going to start seeing much more of the web off the web

That makes me feel sick.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

What is the next big thing?
You're going to start seeing much more of the web off the web. Things that are not intended to be consumed on the web but work on your mobile devices, on your PDAs, transportable with you everywhere. The web will be something you return to to do the heavy lifting of your computation, but for the most part you're going to have very light devices.

I think that's the worst slice of apparent English I've ever read.

'The heavy lifting of your computation' indeed. Why do dotcom tycoons always make the future sound simultaneously incomprehensible and dull?

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Caterina Fake

Sounds like a name from Brass Eye.

[Pinball]

They 'stumble' (their word) on a good idea, sell it prematurely for much less than it's worth, than have the audacity to think they're the Oracle off the Matrix!

Social networking sites = many people = many adverts = muchos dollars.

It's not rocket science, is it?

What I find sad is that so many teenagers rarely go outside nowadays, and if they do, they'll now be spending much more time on mobiles and PDAs, farting around on the web. Not that I can talk, but you know what I mean. I'd just hate to be having to sit exams nowadays. The distractions must make it almost impossible to pass!

[chand]

What I find sad is that so many teenagers rarely go outside nowadays, and if they do, they'll now be spending much more time on mobiles and PDAs, farting around on the web. Not that I can talk, but you know what I mean. I'd just hate to be having to sit exams nowadays. The distractions must make it almost impossible to pass!

I'm pretty sure teenagers do still go outside, I had the misfortune to take my week off during half-term and they were thousands of the bastards. On two occasions, incidentally, I was on the tram behind groups of girls talking about their myspace profiles and who added them. And yet they were outside, clearly going somewhere together (in one instance to see a film at the cinema instead of downloading it). While there will be people who stop going out in order to interact on the computer, I daresay that the majority of the yoot are managing to combine going online with having fairly normal teenage lives.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

They use myspace to organise where they are going to met up to drink cheap cider and intimidate people over the age of 19.

[Pinball]

Yep, I'm sure you're right. Hopefully only a minority will become web-OCDs.

Edit: I saw my first girl gang when I went to The Mall, hanging around the car park and smokin'. Bless their little bitch hearts.