Lately I've been impressed by something I want to share with you. Several of my dear friends who have lost their jobs are finding out that finding new work requires a very new set of skills. If you aren't using social networks to find your next job, you aren't finding your next job. Some people are having a problem understanding this.
What's interesting to me is that people seem to be more willing to entrust their love life to computer networks than their jobs or their careers.
Here's an interesting story from the Wall Street Journal about "Friend Finder," an electronic device that accelerates the computer dating process. What's additionally interesting is that the author, Dara Horn, is the product of a computer dating service.
If it gets off the ground, the "Friend Finder" would become the latest
offshoot of the enormous computer-dating industry, which today's
singles have come to rely on in their search for love. But those who
think of technology-assisted dating as a relatively new phenomenon
couldn't be more wrong. My parents met in 1966 through the world's
first computer-dating service. I am the second of their four children,
and they have been married for nearly 40 years.
Astonishingly, the concept of computer dating did not originate in
some lonely teenager's garage, but rather at the pinnacle of America's
intellectual establishment. In 1965, Harvard University was one of the
few institutions with access to an IBM 7090, a $3 million room-filling
machine intended, according to IBM's 1960 press release, to "speed the
design of missiles, jet engines, nuclear reactors and supersonic
aircraft."
It ended up speeding the design of me.
Here's a link to the story.