A lot of things have changed since the days of Flickr. Facebook has concentrated the sociality of the Internet within its blue borders, like a Walmart siphoning off the mom-and-pop shops that formerly comprised the Internet's gathering places. Communication, in the age of mobile dominance, has become, of necessity, shorter and snack-sized.

Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we've gotten a third of the world's population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.

The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.

'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

When we were making Flickr, we called it the 'Eyes of the World.' The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before - of global, universal travel.

If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.

I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

The Internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the Internet its life and meaning.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.

Every place has a story - or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.

I first got online in the late '80s when I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. I was a reader, into Jorge Luis Borges, and I found, connected to, and delighted in a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark, that I met online.

I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. A fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I found a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark - perfect strangers - whom I connected to online and immediately became enthralled by the idea of virtual communities.