After a whirlwind day of discussions, negotiations, steps forward, backwards and sidewise, all of a sudden the office starts to grow quieter as five o’ clock approaches. “Goodnight, see you tomorrow.” “Thanks for your help today.” “We’ll make that a priority tomorrow.” The door opens and shuts several times until the sounds of activity are replaced by the hum of passing cars on route home.

Alone, I log on to my favorite social networks to learn how my wider sphere of “friends” made out today. Social networking has become the new neighborhood “Cheers” bar and its habit forming, cheap, and delightfully low-cal. It’s not about technology or wanting to be online constantly. It’s about wanting to connect and share.

On Facebook a childhood friend who lives in the UK is celebrating her daughter’s birthday in Spain and has posted photos, and a friend on Saltspring Island has posted a video of herself on guitar playing her newly written song. On Twitter someone named “Lace my Heart” is “following” me. (Yikes) On another site there are requests for “Linking Up” from those in a similar business space as mine who want to exchange ideas. I hang out there a little longer before heading to my favorite news sites. Who would have ever figured we could have all the friends, business contacts, opinions and news we wanted from all over the world so immediately at our fingertips?

In 58 minutes, after loading the office dishwasher and doing a quick vacumn (something a business consultant told me as CEO I shouldn’t do) I head to my car thinking how amazing it is that the diversity the Internet offers today has been created in just over 6,000 days?

I wonder what the next 6,000 days are going to be like?

Will we live on a mobile platform where permission-based, personalized messages are sent by marketers through our social networks? 12 million mobile subscribers accessed their social networks over their phone this past year, and according to Nielsen mobile usage of social networking sites grew 260% in the US during 2008. Mobile web usage is driven by the adoption of smart phones which will reach a saturation level soon. I wonder if some day there will be an application you can download which ties your smart phone together with the home robot so that dinner is cooked when you get home?

While the metrics show that social networking sites eclipsed email in global reach at 68.4% vs 64% in February 2009 the real impact of social media far outweighs the story told by numbers.