FaceBook, MySpace, linkedin, and so many other social networking sites offer great ways to connect with people - and lose touch with reality (and the total time spent on a computer). That is even before location-aware GPS and RFID devices, married to addictive platforms like FaceBook, Twitter and MySpaceTime.net (more on that later) make social networking mean even more being social and not working even during working hours.

It is so ironic that just about 16 years ago I wrote an article contradicting people's then assertion that computers and the Internet were going to make us all anti-social.

Having started what was considered the first online matrimonial sites, at http://imran.com, I dared to disagree.

I felt that though we may spend more time on our computers, the Internet would actually help us find that one in a million connection from places around the world we could never have gone or known in order to physically meet that person.

Little did I realize how social networking would grow. Lesson learnt, something that you consider merely a social observation, or the earliest makings of a trend, must be pursued zealously even as the trend changes shapes and direction dictated through market forces. If you are riding, even shaping, it along the way, your opportunities to start something huge are....well, huge.

Of course, as is my forte, I have a knack for starting new things. But, in the past I also had a "rebel without a cause" habit of not sticking around in such businesses long enough to become a millionaire off them. So, my advice is to never lose your idealism - as that is what will help you achieve the impossible. But, tamper that idealism with pragmatism. Wanting something to be a commercial success does not necessarily mean you "sell out" your dream. Take an alternate view. If you work hard and make Project X a huge money-making success, even if you have to sell the company to investors or venture capitalists, you did not sell out. All you did was leverage Project X to give you the freedom to freely experiment and play with your many other at-times-crazy and at-times-great ideas without being worried about getting funding for them. That can take you from being a "serial entrepreneur" to a "parallel serial entrepreneur"; capable of trying multiple new ideas and businesses and achieving success far beyond what Project X alone would have given you.

In my own case, idealism was a strength, but it was also definitely a huge liability. Usually, I sat back and a few years later watched someone else do the same thing, with funding instead of personal funds, and grow rich(er). I saw the same thing as online dating grow into a huge business with the likes of match.com and others many years after I had launched the first matrimonial database.

When I started Internet email for my native country of Pakistan, I also became "co-owner and co-founder" of the .PK top level domain with my friend and neighbor, the technical genius Ashar Nisar, who went on to establish PKNIC to manage the ccTLD.

Besides getting a kick out of being called "father of the Internet" (at least in Pakistan), I even gave many people free email addresses on imran.pk (the country's first email provider and ISP) to promote email. But, never could I have imagined that sticking around giving something for free I could later have sold it to a giant corporation as hotmail.com did a few years later. Oh, well. Live and learn. Today, FREE is a valid business model. If you grow a business large enough, no matter how much money it is losing, as long as you have enough users, someone will buy you out for millions of Dollars.

When I started writing an online journal and political opinions (Occasionally Obnoxious, Obviously Outspoken Opinions) at http://imran.com in 1995-96, little did I know that