2007: The year of social networking

'Yoof' marketing
JP Morgan Chase markets credit cards to students through Facebook, and Burger King gives away free episodes of Fox Entertainment programmes on MySpace.

Even the UK government is participating. Earlier in October, it launched a spoof band called Baackpain on MySpace to raise awareness of back injuries.

Sometimes it backfires. In May 2005 Proctor & Gamble tried to create a social site around its Sparkle Body Spray product, populated with fake characters like 'Rose' and 'Vanilla'. But the kids smelt the ruse a mile off.

Social sites in Asia
English-language sites dominate the web in terms of member numbers, but the phenomenon is by no means unique to the language.

Japan's Mixi has five million users and is the third most popular site in Japan behind Yahoo and Google. Mixi is for over-18s only who become members by referral.

In South Korea Cyworld has 19 million members, 40 per cent of South Korea's population. The site generates money not just through advertising but by selling members 'digital decorations', or music and graphics for their homepages.

WangYou has eight million members in China. Government restrictions mean that WangYou staff have to watch all uploaded videos and monitor the site stringently.

Online communities predicted
Before the web took off as a consumer phenomenon, State-side pundits like Howard Rheingold and Nicholas Negroponte predicted the death of conventional communities.

People would no longer gather in physical locations for work, entertainment or shopping, they'd do it all online, said the cyber-prophets. Thus communities would form around online activities and interests rather than geographical.

Even intimate liaisons would be conducted online, said some Cassandras, using teledildonics (cyber-sex suits that stimulated the body in a simulation of the sexual act) while we conversed with partners, real or virtual, anywhere on the globe.