In January 2003, Danah Boyd moved to San Francisco just as a new internet phenomenon was taking off: online social networking sites. They were virtual meeting places where people could log on to their computer, meet friends and talk. San Francisco was at the heart of this boom. Boyd, who had studied how internet users represent themselves to others online for her masters degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was intrigued. She went into cafes in the city’s Mission and SoMa districts, where people were sitting chatting on their laptops, and asked why they used these new sites. She published her findings on her blog and they became the basis for the PhD she started later that year at the University of California at Berkeley.