Ramana Mulpury writes: "A few years ago, if you asked anyone at an emerging software company whether ASP/SaaS/On-Demand (referred to as ASP) solutions were for real, you would probably get a 50/50 response. Over the last year or so, I’ve been seeing a completely different scale of adoption of ASP solutions. This scale of adoption can only mean one thing – SaaS is here to stay. Not only that, small, mid-sized businesses, departments of large enterprises, and to some extent entire enterprises, are clearly embracing ASP solutions today."

Jon Udell envisions life in the future:

Grade 3

Your teacher assigns a report that will be published in your e-portfolio, which is a website managed by the school. Your parents tell you to write the report, and publish it into your space. Then they release it to the school’s content management system. A couple of years later the school switches to a new system and breaks all the old URLs. But the original version remains accessible throughout your parents’ lives, and yours, and even your kids’.

Jeremy Liew writes: "If you can’t grow by selling your own inventory, then you’re forced to sell other people’s inventory. That was the driver of AOL’s acquisition of Advertising.com, and it’s the driver of Microsoft and Yahoo’s recent acquisitions as well. It also explains the prices that they paid, which some fear to be too high. Fear of loss is always a greater motivator than the prospect of gain. The big portals are looking down the barrel of a loss of their share of total pageviews, and are willing to fight hard (i.e. pay up) to avert that loss."

Danah Boyd writes: "Social network sites (SNSes) like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo are ubiquitous and today’s youth are spending a great deal of time using these sites to access public life. How is public life shaped by social technology? How are the properties of mediated publics, like social network sites, different from unmediated publics? This article seeks to explore the social dynamics of mediated public life in order to help educators understand their role in socialising today’s youth."

Read/Write Web writes: "Google makes $1 per internet user. But not all of the revenues come from Google Search - they control only 50% of the search market, but the whole web is organically getting covered by Google ads via AdSense and AdWords. Therefore, even if you perform your searches from Yahoo or Live, you may end up being directed to a long tail web page powered by Google AdSense. Another way to look at it - if you use Google as your favourite search engine, you may be giving them $2 per month. But even if you you use a different search engine, you may still give ~$0.5 via Adsense and the Long Tail."

Wikipedia has this about the early days of Facebook: “In early February of 2004, Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook", with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. Additionally at that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded to MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This expansion continued in April of 2004, when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. The following month, Zuckerberg, McCollum, Hughes, and Moscovitz moved to Palo Alto, California to continue work on Facebook's development with additional help from Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker....Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December , Facebook's user base had exceeded one million.”

Mashable put together a timeline of the key events in Facebook's history:

2004
February - Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm room
March - Facebook expands from Harvard to Stanford, Columbia and Yale
June - Facebook moves its base of operations to Palo Alto, Calif.
September - Groups application is added; the Wall is added as a Profile feature
December - Facebook reaches nearly 1 million active users

2005
May - Facebook raises $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners;
Facebook grows to support more than 800 college networks
August - The Company officially changes its name to Facebook from thefacebook.com
September - Facebook expands to add high school networks
October - Photos is added as an application
Facebook begins to add international school networks
December - Facebook reaches more than 5.5 million active users

2006
April - Facebook raises $25 million from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners;
Facebook Mobile feature launches
May - Facebook expands to add work networks
August - Facebook development platform launches;
Notes application is introduced;
Facebook and Microsoft form strategic relationship for banner ad syndication
September - News Feed and Mini-Feed are introduced with additional privacy controls;
Facebook expands registration so anyone can join
November - Share feature added on Facebook, simultaneously launched on over 20 partner sites
December Facebook reaches more than 12 million active users

2007
February - Virtual gift shop launches as a feature
March - Facebook reaches over 2 million active Canadian users and 1 million active UK users
April - Facebook reaches 20 million active users;
Facebook updates site design and adds network portals
May - Facebook launches Marketplace application for classified listings

Tomorrow: The Vision