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June 29, 2004
Recreating social networks
Next year will see the 20 year anniversary of my (German) high-school graduation. Frank and I went to the same school and we're both in this picture somewhere.
About a week or so ago Frank decided to get things going for a reunion party next year and wondered about the best way of getting everybody "onboard". He has been maintaining a list of addresses on the web for a while now - but information was sparse and people hadn't really been keeping in touch. After some thought (setup a wiki, how about a weblog), Frank decided to set up a simple mailing list hosted on his own server (easy sign-up, no registration needed). Those pupils who were known to have an email address were signed up and the first "welcome" email was sent.
It was like putting a spark to dry wood. Within the past week emails have been flying around the network, people on the network have passed on the news to other pupils they were in contact with and these have also signed up. We have all been catching up on what everyone else is now doing, exchanging pictures ("wow - where's the hair gone?") and discussing ideas for the meet-up next year.
Within the space of about a week, and using just email, we have been able to re-form - to already quite a large extent - a social network that existed 20 years ago.
Posted by Matthew at June 29, 2004 11:08 PM