People often ask me why I don’t use Facebook or other Social Media. Hell, my kids ask me why I don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever. At this point I don’t know if my extended family even knows if I’m alive anymore.

“He’s not on Facebook? Did he die?”

“Hey guys! Over here, I live across the road!”

“Yeah, I think he died. Let’s check Facebook for an Obit…”

This seems doubly ironic to them as I am a software engineer by trade, spend a lot of my time talking about social media, and often regale them with stories of yore, when the Internet was young, and how I participated in, and ran fledgling online communities before they were even really a ‘thing’.

And if you want to get really nerdy, I was an old school hand, participating in the early excitement of young virtual worlds such as early MUDs, Ultima Online (remember when British got ganked? Hilarious!), Everquest…

I believe a solid argument can be made, that these fledgling, often awkward communities lay what would be the foundation for our social media juggernauts ten years later (which in turn can be linked further back to BBS/AOL/CompuServe/etc).

So what happened? Where did my online social experience, and the mass-market social experience diverge?

The truth is, I was a fairly early Facebook user. I perused MySpace. I had an early LinkedIn account (reluctantly still do for professional reasons). I tried these out, in contrast to the IRC channels, and the phpBB forums I had already established relationships in.