Cruising the Cyber Highway

What would I or any other realtor do without social media?

We quickly post Just Solds, Under Contracts, and a plethora of market material and updates to keep viewers engaged and to stay top-of-mind.

Funny thing is many in my office aren’t old enough to remember that set this all in motion.

But I do. It was a spring day in 1993 when a global system revolutionizing the way we communicate was unveiled to the public – The World Wide Web.

I was a journalism student in Southern Idaho serving an internship at a local newspaper and decided to write a news story about the launch of this massive cyber highway that seemed to carve through space and time, allowing people to connect across the globe.

Mind you, at that time it was nothing like it is today.

Access was not available everywhere. I had to go to the campus computer lab and use one of the tubes on the school’s local area network. The computers had icons on the desktop that connected via landline – yes, I said landline.

For those of you born after 2000, we didn’t always have cell phones.

Eventually dialup software was available to take home, set up and use. You had to have a personal computer and a landline.

Once online, you needed to know exactly where you were going and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot out on the cyber highway. The powerful search engines, such as Google, were still a few years away.

At first, it was hard to grasp the full potential of the Internet.

But then all kinds of stuff began unfolding. Email became a popular way of communicating everywhere. We were no longer bound to local area networks. Professors began placing assignments online.

Fragments of social media began surfacing, like Six Degrees, Classmates and Myspace. But the social media frenzy didn’t really take hold until Facebook blew up.

And it wouldn’t have come this far this fast if it weren’t for a mobile device initially described as the picture phone (smartphone).

Today, pretty much everything is done via smartphone and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And even though I had the fortune to see how this all evolved, I’m constantly asking the younger people in my office how to navigate the ever-changing electronic world.

I wonder what the next 30 years will bring.