By 2006, the technology industry was bubbling over with enthusiasm for social-network-site success stories, YouTube celebrities, user-created content, and exciting young entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Kevin Rose of Digg. Fox bought MySpace for $770 million and Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. The enormous valuations of these companies made the financial aspects of interactive technology as attractive as they had been during the late 1990s.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 164