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Technology News: Social Networking: Caught Up in the Social Networking Frenzy

Posted in: Blog, Industry News by SpiderWriters on October 1, 2009

On Sept. 19, a Saturday — by all rights a day when normal people do their chores and pay attention to their families — I noticed a spike in my Twitter More about Twitter following. In one day, more than 100 new followers jumped on my bandwagon, bringing the total number up to somewhere north of 400. Now, admittedly, I’ve been slow to jump on the latest social network craze. It’s true, some of my fellow industry analysts have formed entire business models based on supporting enterprises in their social networking strategies and have thousands of followers. But I have remained skeptical to some degree.

After all, I’ve been fiddling around with social networking of one sort or another since the dawn of the computer age. By the mid-1970s, my father’s company, where I worked as a teenager, had already connected brokers and institutions on Wall Street with an instant message capability, and the traders didn’t take long to include in their 40-character blasts, not only position and open interest information, but also snippets on bar mitzvahs, births and relationships. The system, called “AutEx,” was probably the site of the first online date request, although that information, if it exists, lies buried on large-format tapes in a warehouse in some anonymous industrial park.

Read more via TechNewsWorld.