reconnecting with old high school friends…
Friday, May 26th, 2006Friday night, I get a call out of the blue from my old high school friend Aveh.. He’s an ER doctor now, and was in town for some sort of big doctor convention. Aveh and his cousins meet up with me at some North Beach bar, and we head over to Supperclub for some more drinks. Determined to give him the true San Francisco experience, we down a round of Fernet and then head for San Jose Taqueria, the best place in SF to end up after a long night of drinking.. It was great to catch up with Aveh — I hadn’t seen him since the OHS Reunion back in 2003..
But wait… there’s more.. So, I’m in NYC now, and last night I met up with some more high school friends, Kofi and Dave, both of whom I haven’t seen since.. um.. 1993. That’s like a long time — which apparently means we’re “old” now, but honestly, I don’t think we look all that old at all.. Kofi is starting his own company here in NYC and Dave is an attorney who recently had a kid (congrats!).. 13 years was a long time, apparently, but it really doesn’t feel like that much time has passed though.
And.. to top off this whole week of OHS re-connecting, Brian gives me a shout-out on his blog..
At last week’s Techdirt dinner salon, we discussed how the new generation of MySpacers will be different than us. As this generation of kids grows up, they will continue to be much more connected to each other than we are. Out of my entire high school class, I only know of two of us that actively blog and IM (hey… if any of you other folks are out there, drop me a line, by the way).. But, for generation M, blogging, IM’ing and connectedness is like breathing to them, an unconscious act. So, they’ll keep in touch with many more of the people that they meet, so by the time that they’re 30, they’ll have amassed a huge network of acquaintances from which to draw. The power of a network is correlated to the square of the number of nodes, so the value of these social networks will finally be realized at a wholesale societal level at that point by facilitating social and business connections that were there, but hidden until now.
Kids these days are using available tools in a way that already seems foreign to even those of us who live and breathe this stuff every day. Hmmm.. *now* I am starting to feel old.






