I'm Dreaming of a Wired Christmas

This holiday season, I've got social networking on the mind. Over the past few weeks, I've blogged about both Facebook and Twitter, having joined Facebook and thus far rejected Twitter as less than useful. For many of us who are not the earliest adopters, I suspect that 2008 was a watershed year for social networking.

The 2008 election no doubt provided a huge boost for social networking. Barack Obama's use of Internet technology, especially social networking, to help win the Presidential election will be the subject of textbooks and case studies for decades to come. Now that the election season has turned into the holiday season, I am finding social networking to be an invaluable tool in other ways. In just the past few days, I:

-- used Facebook to find the email addresses of some new "friends" and send them an article regarding something we talked about over Thanksgiving dinner;

-- added someone I met at a recent trade show to my LinkedIn network; and

-- took a look at some fun photos of a recent writers' holiday party that one of the attendees put up on our Yahoo! group.

Who knows what other social connections, business associations, and synergistic combinations of the two will result from the use of these and other social networking tools?