I laughed out loud last night when I heard the news from Egypt. I know the situation is quite serious there, of course, and no laughing matter: the army has threatened a coup if the government does not sort itself and the country out within 48 hours. That is quite an ominous threat, but what took me aback was the fact that the army used facebook, at least in part, to get it’s message out. Does that not strike anyone else as quite hilarious? The same medium through which parties are organised and nights in the pub are arranged is now being used to threaten coups. I find it staggering how one website, one social network, has become so ubiquitous, so culturally dominant, that it is now a common way of getting such messages across. Indeed, even british institutions, such as the bbc ad our army, use it as a point of reference. It seems to me that the web these days has become reduced to three gigantic websites known to everyone – facebook, twitter and youtube. These sites have become something we all have in common: meet a random person on the street, and you can just assume he has a facebook account. For the most part, I think this is probably a good thing – it certainly makes keeping in touch easier, especially if you don’t like using telephones and can never remember email addresses. Yet at the back of my mind there is a worry that a kind of social monopoly is forming, and that facebook is becoming too big, too omnipresent, too powerful. It is, after all, a company intended to make money, run by humans not immune to the temptations of power.