In the days of dialup it was more common to fetch a bunch of resources for offline viewing (e.g. newsgroups, POP email, downloading Web sites, and later using "

In the days of dialup it was more common to fetch a bunch of resources for offline viewing (e.g. newsgroups, POP email, downloading Web sites, and later using "accelerator" browser plugins and RSS). Not only was it much faster to browse locally, but it also saved money since connections were pay-per-minute. Whilst social media sites would still work under such restrictions, I think there'd be less emphasis on short back-and-forth conversations, and maybe less of a 'walled garden' effect; since the content would be saved locally, I imagine a variety of 'Facebook reader' applications springing up, scraping and presenting the information in different ways. There would also be implications for the ads and tracking which many sites subject their visitors to.