While the press watches Facebook manoeuvre itself for a flotation, Murdoch splashes out billions on sites already in decline and bitter hacks wet their nibs in readiness for Bubble 2.0 headlines, I’d like to take everyone back a few years to 1999 when e-commerce fever gripped the world.
When the first online boom & bust came round there were a few similarities with the current social networking fever.

1. It was all about eyeballs, not about the money.
2. Sites like geocities, and every ISP deal gave the lowliest user the ability to post photos of their cat’s antics to a global audience, for free. Stick a Paypal button on and you could sell it’s used collars to the world.
3. You couldn’t get a job as a market analyst if you know how to spell the word ‘plateau’. Infinite exponential growth seemed an absolute certainty.
4. Every new site claimed it was going to change the world / asssure the collapse of some long standing institution (shops, papers and the telephone to name three)
5. Market valuations were, well, just silly
6. People who knew how to create the new technologies were worth a fortune

Sound familiar?
Fast forward to 2007 though and quite a lot of the predictions made back then are starting to come true.

You really shouldn’t have a retail store without an ecommerce arm, or any business without a website, any more than you should have been without a business card or a yellow pages listing 8 years ago.

Ecommerce is cheap and the smallest of businesses are getting in on the act

Huge numbers of people have had their lives transformed by the internet, most noticeably those away from the centres of major cities.

Big brands are bleeding a thousand tiny cuts from niche operators who can be more expert, give better service, and - sometimes - better prices.

You see, the only really poor predictions were about the rate at which these effects would be felt. It took time for a generation to learn by trial and error and a new generation to replace them feeling comfortable with the technology.

Outside of the slightly obsessive atmosphere of dotcom office, sites like Facebook, Myspace and Youtube are just passing interests, like Boo.com was 8 years ago, like Urbanfetch was (God I miss those cookies!) and anyone looking to make money from Web 2.0 should be looking forward to an entire cycle of evolution, probably wiping away the current crop of darlings before we see any returns.

So, keep playing with Facebook this afternoon, learn the ins and outs of the new medium, but don’t expect it to make you a millionaire just yet.

It will do.

Just not yet.