An unexpected confluence in information technology could be the best news for computer users since the invention of the graphical user interface. Thanks to advances in wireless networking, Web programming, and microchips for mobile devices, consumers have access (anytime and anywhere) to a world of fundamentally social applications. Instant messaging and Web logs (blogs) were among the first pure social-computing technologies, but things have gone much further.

Members of Flickr.com document their lives through photography, often uploading several pictures a day from their digital or phone-based cameras. They can annotate photos with pop-up notes, play games such as "Guess Where?", and contribute to group albums. Meanwhile, Delicious, Rojo, Furl, and several other cutely named sites let surfers share commentary on the Web pages they've bookmarked. Then there's Dodgeball, a friend-finding service recently acquired by Google. People text-message their locations to Dodgeball's servers, which relay the information to the phones of friends.