My guild actually quit after Firelands to prep for SWTOR (and many of us were in SWTOR beta by that point).
Realms are individual copies of the game world. character portrait that show your health and mana).
This is demonstrated quite effectively by the overwhelming success of You - Tube - a website where anyone can upload a video they have created and share it with the world.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Internet comprised several disparate networks connected by telecommunications infrastructure, and as this new system of communications grew (based on specifications developed by DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and more telecoms companies took an interest in it, so did the number of people using it.
