So, after a bit of a tongue in cheek post about there only being 300 people on the internet, I had another strange set of circumstances confirm this to me while in Brighton for dConstruct.

Whilst nursing the hangover on the Friday, Chris, Rob, Heni and I went for lunch with a splendid chap by the name of Remy Sharp. Remy’s well known for his jQuery javascript workshops, and he’s a pretty funny chap, which is a bonus.

The talk over a lunch of Mexican spicy stuff turned to Twitter, and Remy was telling us how he originally had the username of @remy. However, thinking he’d do his friends a favour and spare a character, he changed his user name to @rem.

Another user eventually signed up for the now vacant user name of @remy, and proceeded to get a lot of twits and messages intended for Remy Sharpe. So much so, that this guy made a website to answer these questions, including offers of employment!

Remy said that the irony was that this guy wasn’t even called Remy. It was his online handle, his name was Dan or something.

Remy? Dan? Oh wait. There’s a small bell ringing in the back of my head…

Zoom back in the past about… ohhh, 12 years, to a Hotline server called 8 Bits of Power. Hotline was like a complete bullet-in board server you could run on a home computer, with user accounts, news and files. 8BOP, as it was affectionately known, was a hang out for fans of the old 8-bit computers and consoles, where we could hang out, reminisce, and argue about completely pointless, forgotten video game facts. I loved the place!

There was a user on 8BOP called Remy. Remy’s real name was Dan Dickinson.

So I said to Remy Sharpe, “hah, I used to know a guy on a server called Remy, but he’s from the States, and this was over 10 years ago… I wonder if it’s him.”

Yeah. It fucking is him.

I have this theory about the real amount of people on the internet.

Every online service I sign up for, the same people are on there. Oh, hi LuxuryLuke, leandaryan, lloydi, philsherry… I must have the same 20-30 people on 20-30 social networking sites.

Now I have a theory about this. There is only actually about 300 people online on the internet. They are your circle of friends, incidental characters and innocent by-standers whom you flame.

Everyone else, every username you see, every blog you read, every email from someone you don’t know, is what’s known as a non-playable character (NPC) in video gaming jargon… think about it. I bet you’ve not got more than 60-80 people on any number of networking sites (excluding Facebook!) that you actually really know and have probably met, and they’re the same people aren’t they?

Prove me wrong…

More proof in part II

Slightly off topic, but I can still link to it tenuously… new advert for the VW Golf, dark, broody night time setting, guy drives through the streets alone in his Golf, nobody else around… hell, that could be me! You just don’t get to see the laptop on the passenger side seat!

Just for a drive? He’s defo stumblin’ for wireless and loggin’ SSIDs!

via Daring Fireball and BoardsMag

Official site coming 23rd May