>The social web was blogs.

The social web was mailing lists: a common meeting place for anyone to communicate near-instantly to anyone else that was also interested in the same thing.

The web came along later and made it prettier. But the social web is a soulful concept, not a mechanical one. It doesn't matter what technology was used - as long as people had the purpose and intention to communicate with each other on a common subject, there was a social web of interconnected minds.