Mapping the tubes

Tubes: A Journey to the Centre of the Internet. By Andrew Blum is an excellent introduction to the nuts and bolts of how exactly it all works. The term “internet” is a collective noun for thousands of smaller networks, run by corporations, governments, universities and private business, all stitched together to form one (mostly) seamless, global, “internetworked” whole. In theory, the internet is meant to be widely distributed and heavily resilient, with many possible routes between any two destinations. In practice, a combination of economics and geography means that much of its infrastructure is concentrated in a comparatively small number of places.

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Rumours of a bid by Microsoft for a social network

This month it was reported that Microsoft had agreed to buy one of these upstarts, Yammer, which is less than four years old but boasts more than 5m users in companies, for $1.2 billion. Neither side is commenting on the report.

In part, companies are setting up social networks because they have a generation of employees who are used to communicating this way. To them, not using social networks at the office (or, just as likely, on the road) would be as antiquated an idea as not using smartphones.

At the headquarters in London of Burberry, a British maker of fashionable clothes, 70% of the staff are under 30. “I grew up in a physical world, speaking English,” says Angela Ahrendts, Burberry’s chief executive. “They grew up in a digital world, speaking social.”

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