Old Friends are the Best Friends

I had lunch with one of my old college roommates today. He was in town for a conference and sent me an email early in the week saying he'd like to catch up. I only had an hour but we met up and I'm really glad we did. We had a lot of fun catching up on friends and family happenings and I left wishing that we'd had more time to sit and chat.

I've been on a 'reconnecting' with friends kick lately anyway. In the last month, I've connected with 3 of my 4 best friends from Junior High! I always tell my mom and dad "You'll never guess who I talked to or emailed with today" and their response is always amazement that 1) I remember people so well and 2) I know how to find them. There's a site I use that has really helped me stay in touch so I thought I'd recommend it to you.



You probably have heard all the talk about Social Networking in the news. Sites like MySpace and FaceBook get talked about all the time. LinkedIn is a sort of social networking site for adults - primarily for building your professional network. Here's how it works:

1. Go to LinkedIn.com and register yourself
2. Create an online profile for yourself - which essentially is the equivalent of your resume - schools you attended, places you've worked, what years you were there, etc.
3. Then - start building your network

Based on what you tell LinkedIn, the site suggests people it thinks you would know - people that worked at your company during the same years or graduated the same year from your school, etc. Once you connect to somebody, you can then see all the people that they're connected to - like seeing who's friends with my friends. I think of it kind of like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game that was popular a while back.

You should definitely check it out. Send me an invitation and I'll connect to you and you can start that way (I've got over 400 connections - so odds are high that you may know some of them!). Find old friends, colleagues, network for business leads or job opportunities - it's a cool site and one that I go to almost every day!