At 30 years of age, I am amazed at how fast the world is changing around us. In less than 1/3  of my life, I have witnessed several revolutions in how the information world has transformed.  Needless to say, back in my school days, we didn’t do our assignments the way the kids of today do. We didn’t have the tools , or the control over the content like today.

Recently, technology has helped us tailor this progressive nature, so much so, that now the information finds us.

So let’s jump back a little over 10 years.

I use to find info for my assignments at school (or for my nerdy astrophysics obsession) by heading to the library and reading as much as I could.  I would take notes, make sticky notes and highlight until the information finally sunk in.  Then when I wanted more I turned to books, magazines, publications, text books, and if I could I would occasionally attend a seminar or conference or do a short course in what I found interesting.

Then around 1996, at the age of 16, I heard of this new flashy thing called “the internet” and that I would be able to find even more information on there.  I could even send an e-mail to someone to help me or point me in the right direction!  Subsequently, as time went by, more and more information began to migrate onto the internet.

People started to share their information with anyone who would listen. They would  broadcast their information in chat rooms, websites, links, and so on.  And it was at this stage, that along came a Spider.

Spiders. Crawlers. I mean, well, Google.  This new idea of categorizing, indexing and classifying all the information on the internet made life a lot easier for everyone. Now instead of just looking for a specific website with information, Google helped us all find the most relevant and similar items all over the internet based on what we were searching for.  Our fingers keystroked and the internet did the walking.

Fast forward a few years to the present moment and it seems our information requests have now changed.  We no longer need to find information, it finds us.  We started off by engaging and listening to those we were interested in, and then developing our social networks with tools like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.

These networks helped us connect with those people who had similiar interests to ours and made it possible for us to share our lives, and information, with special people who shared the direction our lives were heading in.

We followed celebrities, people from our industries, colleagues, subject matter experts, and idols.  We listened, conversed, and connected with them.  Social Media gave us , the little guy, a voice to be heard. A collective voice that demanded to be responded to.  It digitized our six degrees of separation.

For me personally, Twitter has been the real winner. As I’ve described above, in the past, having to search for all the information I ever wanted was a pretty intense undertaking. But now, with the assistance of Twitter, I’m able to follow (virtually) all the people who broadcast the information I want to hear, and it’s delivered to me on my PC.  No effort, no hard work, and with minimal effort.  It’s like having a library on all the latest and greatest news that I’m interested in and it gets sent to me, for free!

Not only has Twitter given me the ability to control the content I want to receive, but it’s also allowed me to connect with people I would never have thought possible. I’ve had a conversation with the great Professor Stephen Hawking and chatted to Astronauts from NASA, whilst receiving their photos from the Space Station orbiting high above my head.

All of this in real time.

It’s incredible when you think about this and consider that 10 years ago, this was impossible for me.

More in regards to the business world, I, like many others, have begun to turn away from traditional advertising, marketing, customer service and sales information from the products and services I like to use.   Now, I’ve turned my attention to my social media platforms to find out everything I can, including the latest information on all types of products and services that I spend money on and use in my everyday life.

Twitter has even changed the news from around the world.

I no longer wait to hear the evening news. Instead, every social media user has become my journalist reporting on events in their surrounding environments, and as such I am able to hear about news from the four corners of the world before the traditional media provides it to me.

All of these incredible changes have happened to me in the last 10 years or so of my life.  The information I once looked for, and sometimes never found, is now something that is conveniently delivered to me, with control over what I do and don’t get, and how I receive it.  All on my own time and in the comfort of my own home….or on my phone!

With technology increasing rapidly and smartphones becoming more and more popular, and the fascinating realms of augmented reality around the corner, I eagerly await what comes my way (and yours!) in the next 10 years.

It’s bound to be beyond anything most of us can imagine.

If I had to summarise these feelings in a single quote it would be this:  “Don’t tell me the sky is the limit, when there are footprints on the Moon.”