The Social Network

I got started in social media through a simple website called LiveJournal.com. From there, I joined a bajillion other websites, made friends, connections, and have networked myself in ways unfathomable to most people I know. I counsel converts-in-process and the curious. I dream of a book deal. And I ask myself, why is Mark Zuckerberg a bajillionaire when he got started the same way as me (and a ton of other people): by journaling on LiveJournal.

A girl can dream, right?

Anyhow, I was curious, after seeing "The Social Network" tonight, to dig up the date that I joined Facebook, a social network that I could let go without any care in the world (while holding firmly on to Blogging and Twitter). After some careful digging around a private forum I've been a member of since who knows when, I discovered the date: December 3, 2004. The moment I joined, of course, I tried to loop all of my newspaper buddies in on the social network. They did, and so did millions of other people. I was part of the trend early on. It's something I wear as a little badge of pride, probably misplaced. Social media, as you know, is the song in my step.

The movie? It was outstanding. I'm convinced that Sean Parker (founder of Napster and un-asked-for mentor to Mark Zuckerberg) is a, pardon me, complete you know what, and Zuckerberg is an awkward genius with a misplaced sense of who he was meant to be. But mad props to him: No matter who you are, you breathe, and Facebook knows it. For better or for worse, it's the here and now. It's no longer the future. Just like Twitter. It's the now and the someday. That is, of course, until the next best thing comes along.

So here's how I heralded the coming of TheFacebook.com, on December 3, 2004:

All right folks. This is a new, obsessive thing. It could be more addictive than friendster AND myspace. It's all for university students -- to register you have to have a unl.edu or unlnotes.unl.edu or bigred or something e-mail address. It's networking, but among university students. You can pretty much see everyone at UNL, create communites, do all sorts of crazy ****.

So if you go to UNL, have an account, create a ******* facebook man. Seriously. John and I are recruiting people for the "daily nebraskan" community.

WE NEED BODIES!

http://www.thefacebook.com

I suppose you could say I had a feeling about where Facebook was going ...

Anyway, I hope you all had an outstanding chag and are prepared to get back to the grind. I know I'm not. Too much homework and not enough time. There's a lot of Hebrew translation, movie watching, paper writing, and sleeping to be done.