Today is a Good Day for Human Communications

When I left the family business in 1995 to join a friend to start an Internet company, everyone thought I was nuts. The world wide web was technically only a couple of years old and nobody I knew was surfing the web or even used email. Microsoft in fact wasn't even on the Internet scene, they were just releasing MSN in an attempt to to compete with AOL. It was exciting to be a renegade at the time, but it was also very difficult having a passion for something nobody understood.

It was the beginning of the tech boom that brought the greatest satisfaction. People were finally getting into this great thing that was the Internet. The work that we were doing was slowly being validated - this was a viable career (in addition to being the absolutely most coolest job).

Flash forward to the first quarter 2009. While the financial markets had been crashing the end of 2008, I had been illuminated to a complete opposite explosion - the social media revolution of Facebook and Twitter - to name a few. Since my start in 1995 I had not experienced something which appeared to me as revolutionary as the Internet and email communication growth of the late 90's. The strangest part however was the similar sentiment I was experiencing when I brought those topics up to people who were not expirementing with social media. In a lot of cases there was absolute detest in the discussion. The biggest sting was a similar response from a customer when I tried to suggest experimenting with these tools to see how they could have business applications.

Yesterday's Ashton Kutcher's win in the race against CNN to reach 1 million visitors and Oprah's first Tweet today will be a watershed moment for human communications. When you consider that the first web page was put up by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, the first public browser available in 1993 (Mosaic), I think you realize that we are just getting out of the silent movie era. Say what you will about celebrities tweeting; millions upon millions of people are communicating quicker, more effectively and with less costs and restrictions. It's a good time to be alive.