He wanted, he recalls, "to get closer to the real internet; close enough to grab the cable and feel the hum of millions of people communicating in the global hive".
But if that number is still large enough to fill you with a feeling of dread, or if watching Kardashian's number of followers jump from second to second feels like staring into the abyss, it's best to remember that old saw: when the Internet closes a door, somewhere it opens a window.
OneSource, which provides information to businesses over the Internet, closed only $2.25 above its offering price of $12 a share.
Xinjiang has been a target of Internet crackdowns in the past, rioting from Uighur in 2009 saw the region's access to the Internet closed for nearly six months, and there are plenty of question marks this time around.
In August last year Zalando, the shoe-retailing Zappos clone started by the Samwer brothers through their investment vehicle Rocket Internet, closed an undisclosed funding round thought to be in the realm of €100 million.
I met Amy on the Internet close to a decade ago.
But as they say, whenever the internet closes a door, it opens a weird, differently-formatted door.
Most parents preferred to receive information from the GP when they had a sick child, but also the internet, close social contacts and other health professionals were used as a source of knowledge.
This diagram is a visual representation of one of the first attempts at representing the findings from the studies, stratified by technology group: open use of the internet, closed therapeutic web sites, smart medication bottles and handheld devices (including mobile phones and handheld computers).
The more shares advertisers get on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet, the closer they get to the finish line.
