The Internet is Better than a Chamber Mixer

A nice thing happened to me the other day. I received an email in my FaceBook account from Jan, a woman I worked with more than 20 years ago at KNIX. The note said "Mikey", do you remember me? Attached to her email was a picture of herself (I swear it was a picture from when we worked together because she hasn't aged). I was excited to get the note and we traded emails with each other bringing each other up to date on our careers, family and what we have been doing since we last saw each other.

Today, received a note from another friend Melissa. She was one of the first national buyers to place commercials on MEGA more than five years ago. She asked me to join her network on LinkedIn and also asked me to write a recommendation for her that will stay in her LinkedIn Profile. I gladly obliged. This sequence of events has repeated itself many times over the past year or so.

Over the last few years I have reconnected with many old friends, from people I went to camp with, old teachers, people I've worked with and kids I went to school with. All this was done through the internet using search engines like Google, Yahoo and/or social networks.

The implications for social networking are tremendous. Social networks bring people together, by region, school, industry, musical preference and any interest, issue or cause you can think of. LinkedIn, a business professionals site has more than 20 million subscribers across 120 different industries. There are more than 200 social networking sites from the small boutique/niche social networks to the large sites like MySpace which is one of the most viewed websites in North America. Social networking is so big the Rupert Murdoch's Fox paid $580 million for MySpace in 2005.

I subscribe to FaceBook, LinkedIn and Flickr. I also subscribe to a few groups on Yahoo and read a bunch of Blogs and forums on topics ranging from travel to pianos, photography, broadcasting, gadgets and much more. Technology allows me to network from anywhere with people anywhere anytime of the day. For me, this is nothing more than a modern day network mixer on steroids.

Social networking is fun, practical and will play a big role in our future!