IT was a year of Snapchats, Phonebloks and talking lamp posts. This week we look back over the state of the net in 2013.

Facebook made a big fuss with the launch of its new Graph Search feature early in the year, but since then it’s been somewhat quieter, seemingly letting its rivals surge ahead.

Certainly, there are signs that teenagers are turning away from Facebook and towards simpler chat apps on their phones – Snapchat (snapchat.com) was huge this year. But of course, Facebook is still a force to be reckoned with, and still has bucketloads of money to spend.

Talking of money, arch-rival Twitter floated itself on the New York stock exchange, making co-founder Evan Williams a multi-millionaire for the umpteenth time.

Tiny videos became a thing in 2013: Twitter launched Vine (vine.co) and Instagram (instagram.com) joined in too. Google’s efforts to catch up by launching its own social network, Google+, were not well received. It annoyed thousands of YouTube users by insisting they use G+ for comments on the video site.

More than anything, and more than ever, though, 2013 felt like the year the internet completed its slow invasion of daily life. What’s new isn’t so much that the internet is everywhere, doing everything, but that people are no longer surprised by that.

No-one bats an eyelid if their TV comes with wifi. No-one is shocked if their child starts school with a new uniform, a username, and a password. We’ve started paying for stuff with our phones, and writing a cheque is starting to feel like a task from the dark ages.

We’ve grown accustomed to the net and it’s an integral part of our lives, whether we want it to be or not.