Today's China and the hyperconnected Chinese marketplace are concepts so big it can be hard to wrap your intellectual arms around them. It helps to focus on only a few impressive facts at a time.

'Twas a dark and stormy night, as dark as it was stormy. On the couch I sat, my eyes darting from screen to screen with cat-like quickness. Only a low constellation of small flashing lights illuminated the anteroom where I'd passed the last fortnight, or perhaps even longer.

John is an average 35-year-old guy. He has a college education, a job and a girlfriend. His passions hew to the Comic-Con vein: superhero flicks, graphic novels, Andy Kaufman conspiracy theories - the kind of stuff that was geeky before geeky sold out. But there is one way in which John is a very strange dude. He never checks his email. This can make friendship with John a challenge. If you want him to show up at an event planned by email - which, let's face it, most get-togethers among college friends are these days - John requires notification via …

Facebook and Twitter, in their rises as platforms, created usable social graphs, and social apps represented the first use of social tools. But for much of their existence, through Facebook Connect, the use of these tools has been along the lines of a monkey smashing something with a rock or poking something with a stick. All of a sudden the monkeys have fired up power drills, table saws and jackhammers.