It's called "social web" for a reason.<p>Instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email are not web. At most the OP is talking about the history of the Internet.<p>{The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[2] commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web</a>}
I was just saying to someone that we had IM on IBM mainframes (the chat facility) or the (confusingly named) Ethernet on DEC VAXes back in the mid 80s.<p>What we used them for was 'are you going for tea?' and other social chit-chat between the various terminal rooms up the Uni...
This is one of those topics where you have to be careful not to slip into meaningless semantics where you're just arguing about how we should use some word and what things should be named.
By their logic the "dark social" is ANY inbound link not coming from "Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YComb, Digg, Stumble" or do I get that wrong? If so, well, that is called the "Internet". It uses hyperlinks to send people between pages on it.
Oops, someone (the author) forgot about AOL, which was founded in 1985 and began mailing floppy disks to people in 1993 (<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/</a>). That is when and where I had my first social web experience (it was in an AOL chat room, specifically). The company and the "social web" boomed from there, so much so, in fact, that eventually AOL bought Time Warner. It was the largest merger ever, at the time (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/</a>). And it flopped, but that beside the point :)
The title could be better. What he's describing with the term "dark social" is not the "Web", it's the internet. That's a distinction that is important to understand. There is much you can do over the internet that is difficult to do over the "web". Moreover, the "web" is still quite centralized in the sense that there are a disproportionate number of servers to clients. It has been called the "calf-cow" model. Some are calling for an end to that.
I vividly remember working on SunOS (later Solaris) and SGI machines and using ytalk, irc and gopher all the time before WWW. WWW made us all want to occupy graphics workstations more instead of vt320s, ha! Even though most of us were in graphics programming at the time, we were working on vt320s, imagine that.
I use few "social" web links, maybe 1%. He fails to mention bookmarking. Most of the traffic I generate comes from bookmarked or search engine URLs. (I may or may not be unusual in that I surf with referrer turned off.)
This piece reads so much like the Salon.com piece in 2004: <a href="http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/" rel="nofollow">http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/</a>