Social networks and search tools are shifting my experiences in increasingly radical ways.

A year ago, I became best friends with someone I'd known mostly online, who lives in New York (I live in California); our connections through blogging, email, phone, flickr, twitter gave us real time linkages and asynchronous connections helped us developed a closeness and sense of connection amazingly real and solid, given the distance.

In the past week, I've had another new experience--being contacted by someone who was from out of my distant past. The first contact was from Nancy, who was my best friend when I was small--she found a post about my parents during a search and reached out.

Then, tonight, someone I knew when I was 15, and then again at 19 or so, found me on Facebook. Amazingly, while I don't much remember Lila that clearly, we seem to have quite a bit in common right now, including a couple of fairly unusual convergences, and a flurry of emails, photo exchanges and notes has ensued.

Yep, we spent a chunk of the night exchanging increasingly detailed emails; in what has to be dubbed cyber-discovery; I'm now hoping we can meet in real life--many years after my 19 year old self knew her 14 year old self--and share amazement at how small the world is and how the virtual universe brings people together again and again.