Oops, someone (the author) forgot about AOL, which was founded in 1985 and began mailing floppy disks to people in 1993 (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-fl

Oops, someone (the author) forgot about AOL, which was founded in 1985 and began mailing floppy disks to people in 1993 (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/). That is when and where I had my first social web experience (it was in an AOL chat room, specifically). The company and the "social web" boomed from there, so much so, in fact, that eventually AOL bought Time Warner. It was the largest merger ever, at the time (http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/ http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/). And it flopped, but that beside the point :)