Nearly ever since I can remember, the idea of communicating with other people over computer networks has fascinated me. I cut my technology teeth on movies like Wargames, and I recall thinking how cool it was that Matthew Broderick could connect to other computers by putting his telephone handset on top of the modem.

Soon after, I saved up enough money to buy a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem (hook the phone line right in–no handset necessary!), and discovered the hidden world of the Bulletin Board Systems. My life was quickly consumed calling BBSs, reading and posting in local message forums, playing door games, and chatting live with sysops. This was an entirely new way to communicate and interact with people, and I felt like it could change the world.

As the Internet gained in popularity, so did the face of online communication, and I soon was blessed with email, newsgroups, web-based forums, cool social networking tools like (the now defunct) SixDegrees.com, and massively-multiplayer online games–all examples of using computer networks for communicating in new ways.

I must confess, though, that for the past few years I haven’t kept up with many of the more interesting innovations in the field, so I was pleasantly engaged once I started using Bloglines to manage some RSS news feeds and started reading some interesting weblogs on the side. Turns out we can use this (relatively) new term, “Social Software,” to refer to any type of software that allows group interaction.

It seems like a cool side effect of this blanket term, now that we’re associating these varied tools with each other through their common attribute of online interaction, has been the emergence of a sort of Social Software meta-group consisting of people who, like me, are excited by the effect it’s having on the way people communicate, and are using tools like weblogs to talk about it. It makes it easier to stay on top of the developments in the field that might prove to alter that effect in interesting ways. As an aside, it was very cool to stumble across a one-time professor of mine (and one for whom I have much respect) from RIT, who seems to be a prominent member of this community.

Now I’m more or less caught up. I’m starting to keep track of my bookmarks on del.icio.us, and hey! I’m even writing in a weblog! So I’m starting to think about the ways I can apply some of my own creative energy to the space. One of the reasons that I became a software developer was to help build tools like this (the other was video games–what kid doesn’t love them?), so I’m excited to begin experimenting with some cool ideas of my own. As time becomes available, I’m considering starting an interesting project that provides community-building tools to java-based web developers, but I’ll be writing more on that later…