One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.

Government IT managers, particularly those in developing countries, view information and communications technology (ICT) as almost a "black" art. Unlike the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, or other countries where Internet and network-enabled everything has diffused itself into the core of Generation "Y-ers," Millennials, and Gen "Z-ers." The black art gives IT managers in some legacy organizations the power they need to control the efforts of people and groups needing support, as their limited understanding of ICT still sets them slightly above the abilities of their peers.

But, when the "users" suddenly have that right brain flash of comprehension in a complex topic such as cloud computing, the barrier of traditional IT control suddenly becomes a barrier which must be explained and justified. Suddenly everybody from the CFO down to supervisors can become "virtual" data center operators – at the touch of a keyboard. Suddenly cloud computing and ICT becomes a standard tool for work – a utility.

MISSION - Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

Josh Elman, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, shared some of the ideas and visions behind one of the fastest growing and most successful social networking sites in the world.   

The monthly meeting of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA) provided the stage, and around 150 interested attendees gathered to learn some of the techniques used by Facebook to recruit more than 200 million members within the space of only two years.

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.