I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here.

Welcome back to the sophomore posting for tosocnet.com.

I didn’t want to go into too much detail, but I thought I’d give some highlights to my background and why I feel (at least vaguely) competent to be posting about social networking. (As this is part one of a two-part series to be completed in a few days, I may perchance have gone into too much detail.)

On OkCupid I list myself as a SoftwareGeekTheatreMagickMacFootballGenealogy nut who as of September of 2006 is also a father. This and $0.50 will really get you nowhere. Those of you who’ve seen my OkCupid profile will notice that even that is a touch edited.

I was raised with Computers and Performance from the time I was very young. While like many kids I was very socially awkward; I did gain a sense of studying human behaviour through my participation in theatre. My father did close-up magic and introduced me to some of the most famous magicians of the 1970s.

At the end of the 1970s I was given a computer. It was an Apple ][. Note... not a plus, not an e... just ][. In 1980 I got a modem. 300/1200 baud. For those of you under the age of 30... that's about 1-4 THOUSAND times slower than wifi at your local $tarbuck$.

At this time there were pretty much only online Bulletin Board Systems. Today we’d call that a web forum with a file upload area. There really was no such things as graphics. Art was all done in ascii.Yes, you really want to look at that link The ethernet as we knew it then was still in its infancy and still limited to high-profile universities and a few military installations. But this was also the time of “WarGames” and kids like me were being given all the wrong ideas. Yes, even an honest kid will try war dialing once.

In college I was an early adopter of services that have since become long defunct. I was a Compuserve user with a 7 digit id. (I misremembered it as 4,3 it was in fact 5,2) I remember writing socially unacceptable media driven stories on Compuserve for the file section. I also remember reading some early work of a friend I’d made online. I didn’t realise at the time that she was already published. Other such lost sites were GEnie, TheSource, and The WELL. I never got onto AppleLink, I hated Delphi and my initial experiences with AOL were just as bad as they are today.

By this point I’d left college with some computer courses (our CS degree was still somewhat experimental) and a lot of course work in Theatre, Radio/TV production, Film Theory, Directing, and Philosophy. I’d told my parents I wanted to major in Theatre not Computers because I didn’t want to spend my life sitting at a desk behind a computer. (Error of judgement #1)

The next 2-3 years were a blur of unemployment.

Then came CMU. The university I spent 8 years at without ever being a student, faculty, or staff. But I learned Unix. I met The Ethernet. Usenet messaging boards. And then there was Nyx. Nyx was my own unix account. I got access to MUDs like Divweb and my own email. I also discovered IRC addiction in a 72 hour session where I accomplished nothing of value.

In 1992 I used the internet to solve a problem. The television show Star Trek: Deep Space 9 would be debuting in January. But I couldn’t find when or where the show would be broadcast. I made some calls and got the date and channel. I posted this on a Star Trek news group. (rec.arts.startrek.fandom). Within a day I had two responses thanking me for the local channel and 3 more asking if I had information for their city as well. I commented that I’d check around and be happy to add any other cities information if I got it. This was in September. By the end of the year I had received contributions to give information for 123 separate markets, had an automated email processing system (that broke regularly), and was publishing weekly. So much so that the week I missed, I received about 10-15 emails from readers checking in with me. I pulled the actual post from Google Group archives.

Amusingly the post references us working on a Gopher server. It’s sad that I was so busy with my Gopher server. I thought it was the future of the internet.(Error of judgement #2). So much so, that when a buddy working on his html search project asked me to join him on it, I told him that I didn’t think the Lycos project would pan out without Gopher support.(Error of judgement #3) We all make mistakes. Some just cost a lot more.

After leaving Pittsburgh I wound up in a string of Computer jobs on the West coast. They paid more than waiting tables. At a small San Diego start-up I created an SMS client. This was tied to an entire suite of collaborative tools and broadcast quality video chat to the desktop that was about 7 years ahead of its time. Granted, our company was really bad at patenting the right things or actually making money in general. So I have no proof of this. During this time I also befriended one of the engineers on ICQ and we’d often beta test source code by passing it back and forth under the guise of ‘chess moves.’

And it was sitting in my new little windowless office, months after the mass layoff that I would discover LiveJournal. It was October of 2001. My perceptions of the internet were going to change drastically. And I was about to drink from the fire-hose without choking.

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