The interesting thing is that most of those people weren't actually pals when working on P2P stuff, but they were all working on the same stuff. Zuckerburg and Parker didn't meet until Facebook was growing quickly. Scour/Red Swoosh, to my knowledge, had no major connection with the other projects.

I view it more like an instance of synchronicity, where a lot of bright young people looked at the world independently and decided that this was the space they wanted to be working on. And then when that space didn't pan out they went their separate ways, but the fact that they were bright & energetic meant that the successor projects became huge.

(I wonder if a similar effect explains the General Magic, Paypal, and Justin.TV mafias.)

Or more likely this is how synchronicity works: - we have 7B people on earth - at any point of time, all possible exciting among the moment are being worked on by someone - if something succeed, we look back and wonder at the synchronicity: how it is possible that 10 people worked independently on the same thing - they must have all have been guided by the superior intellect they had in common!

...

I’m sure there were great synchronicity of people working on squaring the circle in 18th century, and of people working on the philosopher stone earlier, except they were all misguided so we don’t talk about them.

When the internet became a thing for the general public, it was a bit of a no-brainer to try and do "X but on the internet" for all X. "Filesystem but on the internet", "diary but on the internet", "cash but on the internet", "tv but on the internet" etc.