As I crawl out from under my rock and blink at the bright sky above, I stumble into the inevitable realisation that – regardless of how hard I fight against the tide – I cannot hide from the Social 2.0 wave indefinitely.  Despite taking nearly a whole lazy year off from blogging, I find that the rest of the world has moved ever onwards.  Blogs are almost passé, an unfashionable method of monologue that has been superseded by the rise of the socially interactive Twitter and Facebook.

Over the past decade, I have long tried to separate my social and business lives – after all, the two spheres I have created could hardly be more diverse!  However, the pace of technology and social networking makes the task of keeping these two worlds apart an increasingly difficult task.

Microsoft has, over nearly two decades, provided me with great technical direction.  I connected with “computer technology” back in 1994, when I was a mere 15 years old.  Although my computing era started in the days of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2, computers became more than a mere mechanism for videogames when I was given my first computer – a notebook (with Intel 386SX processor) running Microsoft Windows 3.1.  Cemented by the launch of Windows 95 a mere year later, I was propelled into a passion for technology, guided mainly by Microsoft.

Microsoft has not only introduced me to my first experience with computers, but also allowed me to connect to the Internet in the early days (MSN was my first dial-up Internet Service Provider).  My home cinema and music/photo/media collection is powered exclusively by Microsoft technologies, my last two decades of work crafted on Microsoft products.  In fact, I owe my career and my last decade of income to the ecosystem that Microsoft has created – the company I started a decade ago exclusively focussing on consultancy around Microsoft products.  My personal, work, mobile and gaming experiences are all provided by Microsoft.

It is appropriate, therefore, that I should choose to embrace the available social networking technologies as they start to permeate into Microsoft technologies.  Although Microsoft has been encouraging social networking for the last few years, I believe that 2010 sees the advent of social technologies being widely adopted into the majority of its products.  Microsoft Outlook 2010 introduces the Outlook Social Connector, and the recently-announced Windows Mobile 7 Series demonstrates the omnipresence that social networking has in our day-to-day lives today.

As Microsoft have now provided the tools for me to immerse myself in this world of social networking, I have made the decision – after years of actively avoiding it – to embrace the Social 2.0 wave.  Blogging here on Windows Live Spaces will still be my main avenue to communicating with the world at large (my lengthy monologues allow me to hear the beautiful sound of my own voice in my head), but I will also be starting to Twitter, to accept friends on Facebook, and to start re-tagging and geotag my photos for online access to all.

In short, I will finally be merging my social and business lives together…

This promises to be an interesting experience…!  🙂

Despite all that, though, I still choose not to completely open my kimono at this stage, and to hide behind the safety of my South Park avatar!