Bryant Urstadt based the anchor piece for our special issue on Web 2.0 on a simple question: Are social networks good businesses? ("Social Networking Is Not a Business"). "It was hard to answer the question," says Urstadt. "The response I got was either 'Social networking is no business at all,' or 'It's the next colossal Google-like money-making machine.' Neither side seemed to see the other's point of view. On top of that, there seemed to be announcements almost every day: MySpace adopting OpenSocial; a Google-led effort to make it simple for third-party software to be integrated into any social network; AOL buying Bebo; Facebook opening its platform code; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wandering alone around India while key players at his company left and new ones came aboard. The story was almost moving too fast to nail down."

Urstadt last wrote for Technology Review on the role of quantitative financial analysts in the debt crisis of 2007 ("The Blow-Up," November/December 2007). His writing has appeared in Harper's, New York, Portfolio, and Outside.