Usenet: Old school social networking

Usenet is one of the oldest components of what later came to be known as "the internet". It's like a giant BBS or web forum, but decentralized. In fact, the whole idea of the WWW (and the "browser" necessary to read it) was announced in a newsgroup post.

Usenet, like email, requires separate software to access it. Depending on the server, there are between 50,000 and 150,000 distinct "newsgroups" which are loosely organized by topic or area of interest. Some newsgroups contain only text posts, but others contain binaries, which can be anything from software, to movie DVDs, to music, to anything which comes in the form of binary files. They are added as "attachments", much like email. Approximtely 400 terabytes of content is added to usenet each day by its users.
Highly recommended.