simple Bulletin Board System (BBS) that allowed users to exchange software, information, news, data, and other messages with one another. Ward Christensen invented the first public BBS in the late 1970s, and another (named "The WELL") in the late 80's and early '90s arose as a popular online community. The Usenet, a global discussion system similar to a BBS that enabled users to post public messages, was conceived in 1979; the system found tremendous popularity in the 1980s as individuals posted news and articles to categories called "newsgroups". By the late 1990s, personal web sites that allowed individuals to share information about their private lives with others were increasingly widespread. On this fertile period of the web's development, its creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote that: The term "social Web" was coined by Howard Rheingold for this network in 1996; Rheingold was quoted in an article for Time on his website "Electric Minds", described as a "virtual community center" that listed online communities for users interested in socializing through the Web, saying that "The idea is that we will lead the transformation of the Web into a social Web". The social Web developed in three stages from the beginning of the '90s up to the present day, transforming from simple one-way communication web pages to a network of truly social applications. During the "one-way conversation" era of online applications in the mid '90s, most of the nearly 18,000 web pages in existence were "read only", or "static web sites" with information flowing exclusively from the person or organization that ran the site; although the web was used socially at this time, communication was difficult, achieved only through individuals reacting to each other's posts on one web page by responding to them on their own personal web page. In the mid '90s, Amazon and other pioneers made great progress in advancing online social interaction by discovering how to link databases to their web sites in order to store information as well as to display it; in concert with other innovations, this led to the rise of read-write web applications, allowing for a "two-way conversation" between users and the individual or organization running the site. As these web applications became more sophisticated, people became more comfortable using and interacting with them, bandwidth increased, and access to the Internet became more prevalent, causing designers to begin implementing new features that allowed users to communicate