Send-to-friend is so passé.

We've always been able shout out about stuff that we thought was cool, would make it big, or simply just tickle someone else' fancy. In more technical speak - peer endorsement.

Some time back towards the dawning of the so called web 2.0 and probably a by-product of the very social open source movements was being born a notion that would allow people to 'create' .. easily .. and then share, online. The web has always been generally an open space, swerving tighter control measures that would see the ends of anonymity, enforce stricter taxes and lock downs on freedoms to express and share content, information and ideas. Although most of the freedoms to 'create', whether that would be as simple as text content or a captured image, was restricted to those who could write code - html, the mesh and fabric that is behind the web.

Skipping along through the first ten years of the web we had guest books, online diaries, message boards, forums, and the first web communities. It probably wasn't until blogs and social networks took off in any big way (leaving wikis more to the tech crowd), that any Joe was enabled to leave their mark on the web, without writing a line of code. This was something new, because it was happening in a big way.

Social networks really began to take off sometime around 2002 and just a few years later we (developers, coders, web enthusiasts) started to realise some rather fundamental changes taking place online. The web was now being talked of as a platform in it's own right worthy of competing with desktop computers. It was going open-source, it was sharing, it was becoming very user-centric and people were being invited to participate in all this. Be sure to read Tim O'Reilly's essential text 'What is Web 2.0' September 2005.

Giving people the tools to create was obviously fulfilling something much deeper, evolving far beyond just communicating and just expressing ideas into making stuff. Enter two phrases that would grow beyond their original and natural purpose, abused by the buzz and eventually shunned - UGC and viral.

go on to talk about send-to-a-friend, born out of UGC, viral

and how subscriptions will replace it.