Trebor-- this is one of the best-researched, most clearly-communicated articles I"ve read on the topic. It's a helpful gloss of all the important steps and players along the trajectory of the social web. Keep going! Loving it.

Looks good. Interesting narrative, and some non-obvious connections being made. Some things you might consider:

1.
Networked sociality didn't start with the telegraph either :). "Networks" are a way of looking at things (paying attention to the links rather than the nodes) and so have always existed. Perhaps you mean "social networking technologies." The distinction gets to the whole confusion of a "social networking system" vs. "social networks" that is probably worth drawing conceptually.

2.
You fast forward to the memex, bypassing what continues to be the most important social networking technology ever: the telephone. Especially the automatically switched telephone, which ends up being addressed in Baran's famous switching article. See, esp., Carolyn Marvin's book.

3.
Can't leave out the Community Memory project :).

4.
I assume you are already aware of this:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/08/02/history_of_soci.html

Hi Alex, Thanks for your comments (I look forward to discussions on the Facebook group). My focus is explicitly on person-to-person communication via the Internet. The telegraph is one example, one among many that could be traced, taken from the age-long pre-history of *networked sociality.* This is not a history of networks or of communication in general. I really narrowed the focus to not loose my sanity (:
Thanks for the reference to the Community Memory Project, I was not aware of it.

Very interesting and well written. A handy tool for everybody interested in Sociable Web.

Great work, Trebor, thanks for sharing. Most thorough history of the sociable web I know (I didn't know about the memex and Phonophor ideas for example). This will become standard in my Internet-related courses.

I was a bit irritated concerning the Cage/participatory culture paragraph. Maybe Brecht's radio theory would be a better example in the context of participatory media development?

Thanks Benjamin.Brecht's radio essay is well worth adding. We are currently working on an interactive historical time line for the Web and we will add it there.

I am aware that the Cage example is on the one hand an all too known and often cited work but remember that on the other hand it really is a key example of participatory art practices and as I point out, the participation in this piece is somewhat involuntary.I re-wrote that part several times. Perhaps it is still hard to make that link.

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