I can’t believe I’ve been “blogging” for over seven years. How the hell did that happen?

Actually, I think it was longer — if I remember correctly, my first blog was on some service whose name I simply cannot remember now, until I ran across Blogger in 2000. Then I switched to there, using their service to run a blog I hosted on server space my then-employer let me use for free, and even let me use their nameserver for my domain name … drewspace.com. That name is now gone to someone or something else. But I did manage to suck all the old archives into my web space here. Here’s the first posts I have a record of, from August 2000.

This boggling (bloggling?) stretch of time occurred to me once I saw Ross Mayfield’s recent post about how he’s been blogging for five years. Of course, he’s much more industrious than I, what with a company of his own and writing that’s a heck of a lot more focused and, well, valuable. But of course, social software has been his professional focus for quite a while, whereas for me it’s been more of a fitful obsession.

“Social software” is turning out to be the monster that ate everything. Which only makes sense. The Web is inherently social, and so are human beings. Anything that better enables the flow of natural social behaviors (rather than more artificial broadcast/consume behaviors) is going to grow like kudzu in Georgia.

Anybody thinking of social software as a special category of software design needs to wake up and smell the friends list. Everything from eBay to Plaxo is integrating social networking tools into their services, and Google is looking to connect them all together (or at least change the game so that all must comply or die of irrelevance).