Another mind-numbing meeting last night with a cloud company.  Oddly, one of the longer discussions we had dealt with the social and economic benefits of cloud computing.

The average IT installation for even small companies requires quite a bit of dedicated IT facility/room space for housing servers, uninterruptable power supplies, switches, routers, and other network support equipment.  In addition to the value of space consumed by storage systems and applications servers, there is normally a fairly high cost associated with electricity and cooling needed to keep the equipment operating.

Most corporate IT equipment runs at a very low level of efficiency.  This means that, for example, servers are designed for peak traffic and processing requirements, which may only occur once a day or even once a month.  The rest of the time those servers are running at between 5~10% of their actual processing capacity. 

It was a clear, very beautiful morning in Sydney. Mike brought the Pitts biplane up to about 4,500ft, and you could literally reach out and touch the mountains from the open cockpit and passenger seat. I came close to better appreciating the words of the classic poem that is understood by pilots, and very few others;

Mike Lagunowitsch, the pilot, a friend, and former colleague at Sprint Australia and Sprint China, is one of the few people I know who can really step away from the job, and escape into complete indulgence in life. Then almost like flipping a switch he returns to being one of the most enthusiastic, aggressive visionairies in the telecommunications industry.

Savageau: Mike, what are you doing these days? Been a long time since we had a chance to catch up.

Last Thursday I did my normal morning routine of checking email, phone messages, and with a few remaining moments before the first of what appeared to be an endless series of scheduled teleconferences, checked my LinkedIN account.

I been a member of LinkedIN for several years, and have accumulated a couple hundred "connections," and joined a handful of industry-related groups.  I am not completely open to receving LinkedIN invitations, but do give each invitation a quick background check if I immediately recall why or how I know a person requesting to be a connection.  Pretty much the same as everybody.

Well, on Thursday I sat back and thought, "how can I possibly know all these people in the connections list?"  So I started to go through the directory of connections, and it was like going through a personal history book.  Shortly after beginning my review, I caught myself wondering out loud, "wow, haven't heard from that guy since I lived in London 10 years ago - wonder what he is doing..."

Remember the good old days. Those days when after graduating from high school you could pretty much forget about all your classmates, as within two weeks of finishing school we were scattered to the four winds?  Your buddies in the army, whom you forgot about within a week of transferring to a new assignment?  Frat or sorority friends whom you have not contacted in the past 20 years?

Social networking sites have started changing all the rules of how we interact with others.  Sites ranging from classmates.com to MySpace are bringing not only entirely new communities together, but also bringing us back in touch with those whom we spent quality time with in prior phases of our lives.

Professionally, there also social networking sites that have stood out among their peers - Facebook and LinkedIN.  What makes both of these sites unique is the number of members.  For example, LinkedIN claims over 35 million users representing more than 200 countries, with executive membership from all Fortune 500 companies.  That is a lot of people.