If the Summer of Love captivated San Francisco in 1967, and the Summer of Sam scared New Yorkers half to death in 1977, London in 2007 was most definitely the summer of Facebook. In the space of only two months, Facebook.com exploded into a kind of electronic ectoplasm which found its sticky way into almost every organisation, every dinner-party anecdote and every budding romance. In the febrile atmosphere which followed, it seemed that each conversation I had was punctuated with lines such as “How many friends do you have?” or the slightly more sinister “Consider yourself poked.” (The poke, Facebook’s signature function, is a kind of electronic “wassup” which Facebookers send to friends and acquaintances for fun.)

Facebook is not the only social-networking site which likes to think of itself as the new, new thing. It is not even the biggest; MySpace boasts 114 million residents, while Facebook is home to fewer than half that number. This year, however, has undoubtedly belonged to Facebook, and nowhere more so than in London. By July, 882,000 Londoners had migrated there, double the number who were signed up in May and an almost twofold increase in just two months. So speedy was Facebook’s rise that Rupert Murdoch, who had shelled out $580m for MySpace just two years previously, was reportedly worried that he might have backed the wrong horse.