In M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, the protagonist Elijah explains to reluctant comic-book-character-to-be David that "...every superhero has a weakness, yours is water". If I was a superhero, my weakness would be "slow reading". It is not such a problem when slogging through technical manuals or taking in poetry, but try surfing the web to come up to speed on a new, hot, acronym laden technology. Its a real sleep depriver. So it has gone with Social Networking Software (SNS).

Part of the impetus of starting this web page, which will slowly grow into a blog, was to better understand the excitement I discovered around SNS. A large amount of attention is being paid to the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) systems popping up. Their quick growth among certain demographics has caught people's attention. People being those who work in venture capital, the media and certain nerdy academics. What kind of growth? A few weeks ago I signed up on Friendster with a direct connection to 1 person. I immediately had over 10,000 "friends" within four degrees of separation. Today I have over 19,000. The blog tracking Technorati, claims to follow over a million web sites devoted to blogging. There are likely more than that, like this one.

Some day I will relate, to my great grand children, of my storied role in the birth of the web. I am sure my history lesson will have a great many fictional aspects, but one that will remain true is the feeling of something big happening. There were people who did not get it, there were people who got it, there were people who got it, but seemed to be getting some illegal substance along with it. Then it was upon us and we were way too busy to know what was happening. It was a great feeling.

Perhaps I am just being wistful thinking that this latest use of the network is important. Important or not, it is interesting to think of blogs balancing out centrally controlled media outlets, of FOAF systems revealing how closely all of us are tied together, of wikis and open source providing a path for knowledge growth outside the ever tightening intellectual property laws. At least it is interesting to me. It is starting to become interesting to others, too, as evidenced by the packed house of a recent after school event at Stanford. The answer to the panel's topic "Social Networking: Is there a business model?", did not get answered directly, but seemed to morph into another question "Social Networking: Is there enough people that believe there a business model?" That answer seemed to be yes, and with any luck the race has begun. Who knows, maybe I'll have some more stories to tell the great grand kids.