Illustration by David Simonds

“THE farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” Apply Winston Churchill's aphorism to the internet, and about the farthest back you can look is 1994, when the previously obscure computer network first became known to a wider public. Many people first ventured onto the internet from AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, which were subscription-based online services that offered e-mail, chatrooms, discussion boards and so on. Having provided their users with access to the internet, however, these venerable digital communities were undermined by it.

Why stay within a closed community when you can roam outside its walled garden, into the wilds of the internet proper? Admittedly, it took a while for open and standardised forms of e-mail, discussion boards and file downloads—not to mention a new publishing technology called the world wide web—to match the proprietary, closed versions that preceded them. Today only AOL survives, and in a very different form: as an open web portal supported by advertising.

Now history seems to be repeating itself. Two of the biggest online phenomena of the past couple of years—social networks such as Facebook, and virtual worlds such as Second Life—look an awful lot like AOL did in 1994. They are closed worlds based on proprietary standards. You cannot easily move information in and out of them: try shifting your Facebook profile to MySpace, or moving a piece of clothing or furniture from Second Life to Entropia Universe. True, the walled-off nature of these communities is part of their charm. And their proprietary nature is also inevitable: only when a technology is established do standards emerge. But that is now starting to happen with social networks and virtual worlds.

The gate in the corner and the meadow beyond

Just as the web's open standards, embodied in the Netscape browser, displaced AOL and its ilk, so Netscapisation awaits Facebook and Second Life. As new standards make it easier to pipe data in and out of social networks, the need to visit a particular website to catch up with friends may come to seem as quaint as AOL's “You've got mail” alert ( see article). Similarly, work is under way to allow links, akin to those between websites, to be set up between virtual worlds based on open standards and hosted on different machines. Why bother with an island in Second Life when you can build your own world?

Marc Andreessen, Netscape's co-founder, now runs Ning, a start-up that lets people set up their own social networks; and Multiverse, founded by several Netscape veterans, is one of several firms providing virtual-world construction tools. The question for Facebook, Second Life and the rest is how fast they can adapt. Philip Rosedale, Second Life's creator, is keenly aware of the historical precedent and scans old news reports about AOL in an effort to avoid a similar fate. Facebook, a little reluctantly, is starting to open up. Most curious of all is AOL's acquisition of Bebo, an up-and-coming social network, earlier this month. Has AOL forgotten the lessons of history—or might it just be uniquely well-placed to apply them?