Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.

« As e-mail systems became standardized and interconnected, interpersonal messaging emerged as one of the most powerful and compelling features of the ARPANET, just as Taylor had anticipated. Very soon after Ray Tomlinson's invention of network e-mail, recalls Vinton Cerf, 'people created mailing lists, one for science fiction and another one for restaurant reviews. And we could see instantly that e-mail was a social medium, in addition to simply being an interoffice memo system.' Mailing lists allowed groups of people with similar interests to share information and engage in discussions using e-mail. Early mailing lists included science fiction lovers, wine tasters, and network hackers. Restaurant reviews, meanwhile, were compiled into a collaborative guide called YUMYUM, which was maintained by researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Any ARPANET user could send in a restaurant review for incorporation into the guide, which was made available for general download. Each reviewer was given a unique identifying number, which was added to the end of each of their reviews, so that readers could determine which reviewers they agreed or disagreed with, without knowing who they were. A version of YUMYUM from 1976 explains how this collective approach to authorship worked.

This edition of YUMYUM lists 480 restaurants of the San Francisco Bay area and some outlying places together with 1,056 opinions from our readers. Many conflict with one another. Rather than attempting to form a 'consensus,' we let them tell it their way. Of course, different people are looking for different things and restaurants change with the passage of time and chefs … With a little experience, you can begin to evaluate the evaluators and draw more reliable conclusions from the opinions given here. We are dependent upon you to provide timely updates and information on interesting new restaurants. When preparing remarks for this guide, please try to express your views concisely and accurately … This guide is organized by geographical regions and types of cuisine. The coverage falls off approximately with the square of the distance from our laboratory. »