In 1997 I was working for a little games company called Purple Moon, spun out of Paul Allen’s Interval Research. Our target market was girls aged 8-12. Those of us on the website team who’d already been interacting online for years saw and realized the potential for the community website that we were building, though much of the company’s marketing and mindshare was spent on computer games and merchandise. By the time the company went under there was a healthy community of young girls busily exchanging postcards and electronic treasures on purple-moon.com. Yesterday I got acquainted with Facebook, the community site that these same girls are likely using nowadays, and I found a delightful surprise. There’s a small Purple Moon group on Facebook. These young women, now of high school and college age have remembered the site as a significant enough part of their lives to form and find a group devoted to it. I joined the company hoping to make a difference in girls’ lives and never really believed I had done so, until now.