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As I began preparation for my exciting new job with CTFC, I was coincidentally touched by the great power of social media networking.

In the last 3 years I have gotten involved with social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, even though I had felt that e-mail and instant messenger was all I needed. My older brother, on the other hand, has long had his networking profiles and made me a Friendster profile before I had anything else.

I now see how important having those profiles can be.

My brother, no longer using Friendster and therefore not wanting any friend updates, recently logged on with the intention of deleting his profile but was stopped when he saw the message attached to a friend request. It read, "Hello cousin, this is your long lost cousin from the Philippines."  I then logged onto my page, after not being on it for some time, and found the same wonderful message awaiting me. It was amazing.

Through the power of social media networking we were able to be located, allowing us to see and learn about cousins we had not seen since 1993.  I have tried other search engines to find my relatives' e-mail addresses, but checking social networking sites never crossed my mind. 

It is wonderful to think of the communities that are created through social media. The sharing of information is useful to come together on any level, starting from your neighborhood community to your network of friends and family across the globe. We are finally in touch with one uncle and some cousins and I hope more will follow. Not only will this be wonderful for us to keep in touch but this has also encouraged my uncle to get his own internet connection, opening a much larger world for him and his family.

And so, here at my new job, I have now personally learned why our ZD 2.0 Grantmaking has focused on social media as one of its technology strategies