People that have been to see last year’s blockbuster The Social Network, could be forgiven for thinking that the rise of sites like Facebook started just a few years ago.
But to find the true origins of social networking you have to go further back than 2004.
In a side street in Berkeley California, the epicentre of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, I found what could well be the birthplace of the phenomenon.
Standing outside what was once a shop called Leopold’s Records, former computer scientist Lee Felsenstein told me how, in 1973, he and some colleagues had placed a computer terminal in the store next to a musicians’ bulletin board â€" of the analogue variety.
They had invited passers-by, mainly students from the University of California, Berkeley, to come and type a message in to the computer.
Back then, it was the first time just about anybody who was not studying a scientific subject had been allowed near a machine.
“We thought that there would be considerable resistance to computers invading what was, as we thought of it, the domain of the counterculture,†Mr Felsenstein explained.
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