Coffee and social networks

Watching the Open University Cooking Programme on Saturday morning (lying in bed, natch), I discovered the following fascinating fact: both the London Stock Exchange and Lloyd's shipping brokerage developed on the sites of coffee houses. Coffee houses in the 18^th Century were renowned for bringing together diverse groups of people and for being places where "anything goes" conversations were accepted. I suppose this neatly ties up the anti-capitalist demonstrators' targeting of Starbucks - but then the French Revolution was fomented in coffee shops too.