Serendipity and the Emergence of Social Networking

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve had a prophetic gifting. It's not something spooky or mysterious. In fact, it has led me, serendipitously, into the most exciting aspects of life. It's not a "sixth sense", because I know it’s not from me. I don't call myself a "futurist", though other “visionaries” commonly use that title today. I have a deep, sometimes spiritual, understanding that certain things are more important and more relevant than they seem to be on the surface.

Looking back, it’s easy to see. In 1983, I started networking CPM computers together with RS-232 cables and using software, developed in Pascal, for different people to communicate with each other with phone lines and 300 baud modems. I was spearheading into something new that I called "CompuNet". Shortly thereafter, Compuserve started an online revolution on a somewhat larger scale by providing an online, character-mode service with local dial-up numbers which would be absorbed into an even later-emerging AOL.

In 1985, my systems engineering work at NASA-Kennedy Space Center, led me into a study of relational databases, and in 1986 I found an obscure VMS-based product called Oracle. Recognizing the import of what I had found, I quickly became an advocate and evangelist, starting what would become the largest online unofficial Oracle group in the world with nearly 100,000 members.

On March 8, 1993, I registered my first domain name with the non-profit company, UUNET, which ran the domain name service and InterNIC for the National Science Foundation (see history). I was amazed at the time that there were only 116 other commercial firms in Virginia with their own domain names.

In 1995, I started Spiderware to continue building the virtual communities I envisioned on the Internet (pre-web and web-based), following on to the years of providing dialup network sharing through BBSes and fledging, store-and-forward dialup networks such as FidoNet and RIME.

In 1998, I started ADSDAQ, an Internet advertising network for the masses, for the millions of webmasters who have niche, passion-based, websites and the millions of potential advertisers whose only other option was the Yellow Pages.

On December 12, 2003, I found out about LinkedIn. I was the 152nd person to join up in the metro Washington, DC area. But I knew, and know, that this will be big. It presents itself to me as having the potential to emerge as a giant component. It has all of the characteristics of revolutionizing business culture, just as Ebay has done for used junque, Amazon has done for books, and Google has done for searching.

But this is much bigger than that. It's not about "hits". This capability can and will inculcate itself into business practices, just as important to us as our email or cell phone is now, and how WiFi will be. It will then emerge as an energetic force in tranforming social and economic culture, around the world.

I'm looking forward to hearing about the first "billion dollar deal" instigated through LinkedIn. I'm working on a few multi-million dollar deals using my new LinkedIn relationships, and I'm just getting started. And there are now 600,000 others out there on LinkedIn just getting started.

And you can take my word for it, this will be BIG!