I thought I remembered reading about Era 5, Social Commerce, somewhere before, so I searched my presentation archives (it seems I have been talking about internet marketing for a long time, where did my youth go) and found this reference from 1997. Twelve years ago. In 'Net Gain' Hagel and Armstrong  predicted  "electronic communities"  would emerge - communities of interest is what we call them now - whose commercial value is their ability to aggregate customer demand. Prescient. They did call it 'cyberspace'. Haven't heard that word for a while. A couple of years back, while doing a project in South Korea, I was surprised by the routine way in which my Korean customers joined online buying groups to get better prices. For example, one was in the market for a Nikon camera, so he joined a Nikon buying group on Cyworld. When enough potential buyers had signed up the group organiser would 'shop' the volume to various retailers and suppliers to get the best deal for the group as a whole. Job done, group closed. Whose in charge in this scenario? The Era 5 community clearly. During my miss-spent youth this was called 'Power to the People'