In the final, end of series montage, my Yearbook signatures as we all go on to bigger & better things…

– 5-7 random guys help me install a new video card and RAM into my computer, via realtime FriendFeed discussion
– For months, I have a daily French-English idiom exchange with directeur, half way across the world, indulging in our mutual love of the quirkiness of languages
– Joining an ultra-geeky Sims3 group room where we made a networked version of the game, and played each other’s roles with a dozen or so others (mostly unknown)
– Two face-to-face meetups in San Francisco, on top of roofs, in the Castro, mostly talking about the internet and food, and met some very cool locals – mike doeff, j toeman, Richard, Justin
– Introduced to new music, like Ronson’s Daniel Merriweather, & one of best albums of the year, suggested by Bren in Seattle (privet Bren!)
– Listening and contributing in on conversation sin Chinese, Russian & Swedish ( hej Baard!)
– Venting in longer-than-150 character phrases, whenever I want, to at least a few listening friends, *any time of day*
– A longstanding Scrabble opponent, who I smeared in Scramble but he has maintained himself quite well in the word game… Louis
– Naughty fun in the (old) Ladies’ Room, lots of drama, lots of gossip. Lots of flare ups, lots of camaraderie.
– The really rich and fascinating debates and news throughout the Election 2008, mainly because of the awesome room Steve Isaacs setup, and the development of realtime threaded chat by the FF team.
– The neat MySQL meet-up where I learned about the revolutionary database setup at FF, and got to fangirl Bret.
– Sharing the weird, wackadoodle dream symbolism with RAP and Anika
– Ruby on Rails help from Ahsan…
… and countless more.

I have a lot of boring Silicon Valley, technology sector thoughts on new businesses and why or what or how this all went down, but I just wanted to post a mushy write-up on what online communities can become, and how this one affected me far more than the dozen or other ones I was testing out last year in March. I had no idea I would stay engaged, so deeply, for so long.