Twitter looks to start making some money

Twitter Inc.’s co-founders say the rapidly growing online communications company will eventually charge fees for its services, but it’s unclear which ones and what will drive revenue.

“There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money,” said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.

“We’re working on it right now,” Williams said at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.

Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don’t send messages under its name.

Still, after nearly one hour of questions from journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and from the audience, the co-founders gave no clear picture of Twitter’s business model. Stone demurred when asked what would be the company’s key revenue driver in two years.

Williams said he wasn’t opposed to banner advertising but was unenthusiastic.

“I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we could do,” he said.

Williams said one of his top priorities was hiring more people to help grow the company but he didn’t give a headcount target. San Francisco-based Twitter has 43 employees, he said, double its count in January.

Twitter allows anyone to write about what they’re doing or what’s on their mind in messages sent through the Web or cell phones, also known as “tweets,” which are limited to 140 characters. The unconventional, free service has attracted millions of users.

The co-founders said they know the hype surrounding Twitter won’t last forever.

“If you pay attention to it too much, you can run yourself off the rails,” Stone said. He added, “Pretty soon, everybody’s going to hate us.”

The privately held company has been a subject of buyout speculation by a big technology company, but Williams said he believed Twitter would remain independent.

There are plenty of ways, what about looking into the business models of the other websites that allow free access for its users? like Facebook, Myspace or Shareapic

Twitter proposes TV competition series

Twitter, the Web site that asks what everybody's doing, says it wants to be doing a TV series.

The social-networking service said Monday it has teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the site, which invites 140-character postings from members around the world.

The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format.

The producers call their proposed series the first to bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen.

"Twitter is transforming the way people communicate, especially celebrities and their fans," said Reveille managing director Howard T. Owens, who expects the new project to "unlock Twitter's potential on TV."

No further details were made available on the show's format or when it might hit the air.

Reveille's scripted entertainment includes "The Office" (NBC), "Ugly Betty" (ABC) and "The Tudors" (Showtime), plus reality programming that includes "The Biggest Loser" and "American Gladiators" (both NBC).

Brillstein Entertainment's credits include "Real Time with Bill Maher" (HBO), "The Sopranos" (HBO), "According to Jim" (ABC) and "NewsRadio" (NBC).

The San Francisco-based Twitter, which was founded in 2007, is one of the Internet's fastest-growing sites. A recent Nielsen report found that unique visitors to Twitter skyrocketed from 475,000 during February 2008 to 7 million a year later.

Pillow Fight Lands Man In Court

South Burlington Vt. Man Charged For Inciting Pillow Fight


The man police say organized an impromptu pillow fight in front of a Vermont mall is being dragged into court to face charges.

Darin Cassler, 21, of South Burlington, Vt., was charged Friday by city police after he allegedly incited a pillow fight at the town center on Church Street. Police said his actions warranted a disorderly conduct charge.

The feathery fracas was organized by Cassler, police say, and included about 50 participants. A video of the pillow pounding appears on several Internet sites and shows about a two-minute scrum that began and ended with a whistle being blown.

Not long after the whistle sounded ending the puffy clash, Cassler can be seen in video footage of the event being taken away by a police officer.

The pillow fight was organized on the social networking site Facebook, which listed the following rules:

- Bring a pillow and a container in which to conceal it.

- Assemble on the street as if you were loitering, do not acknowledge anyone else participating.

- Our host will shout 'pillow fight' and we will all spontaneously break into a big miasma of feathers and pillows.

- Soft pillows only!

- Swing lightly, many people will be swinging at once.

- Do not swing at people without pillows or with cameras.

- Remove glasses beforehand!

- The event is free and appropriate for all ages.

- Wait until the signal to begin.

- This event is more fun with feathers!

Click For Facebook Post On Event

Courtesy of WPTZ.com

Top 10 Reasons your company should NOT Be "tweeting"

Mainstream media is in an orgiastic frenzy of coverage about Twitter. Everyone's Tweeting these days it seems, from celebrities to CEOs according to CNN, The View, Today, the NY Times, the Wall St Journal and just about everyone else. Each of them covers Twitter like it's some overnight phenomenon that came out of nowhere, although Twitter has been gaining traction for three years and now has over 14 million members.

So, Should your company be on Twitter? Not necessarily.

Top 10 reasons not to join Twitter:

1. every Tweet has to be approved by legal. Twitter is a social network where conversation is fast and interconnected. If you have to wait a day, or even a few hours for your 140 character Tweet to gain legal approval, Twitter will be the wrong platform for you.

2. you plan to use Twitter like a giant RSS feed, broadcasting nothing but headlines, deals. People follow people they find interesting. If all your Tweets are a one-way street: Block!

3. you think using Twitter is a social media strategy. It's a tactic, a tool, not a strategy. It works if you already have an online following who'll view your Tweets as a way to interact with your company on a human level

4. you think it's a good idea to have someone tweet as if they are the president of the company. Authentic and transparent are the keys. It's fine if someone besides the CEO tweets for your company, as long as they say that's what they're doing

5. you are not going to respond when people direct tweets at you. Twitter is like the new watercooler. If you walked out to the water fountain and talked non-stop to people gathered there, they'd certainly be happy when you left. Ditto for Twitter.

6. you think paying for followers might be a good idea. Followers are earned on Twitter. Be interesting, make only every 10th Tweet about you and you'll gain and keep a following.

7. you think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you. Quality trumps quantity.

8. you want to protect your updates. If people have to ask permission to see what you're posting on Twitter, you're defeating the purpose - which is conversation.

9. you plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics. Google Analytics won't give you true tracking. You need to track the urls you post with a service like budurl or bit.ly and use one or more social media tracking tools so you can get real-time stats on Twitter

10. You think you can market to people with whom you have no relationship Listen first. Monitor what's being said about your brand, your industry, your products. Then join the conversation and become part of the community. Then your occasional marketing messages will be accepted, or at least tolerated because you also add value to the community.

Is Facebook losing its glow?

The following was a pretty good read I found in (on? it was online...hmmm) Fortune magazine, that I thought i'd share:

Is Facebook losing its glow?
The social networking site is still growing -- but that also means serious growing pains.

It's been a busy couple of months for social networking site Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on the cover of FORTUNE (dressed in a tie, no less) and shared with us his plans to turn Facebook into the next digital communications platform. Soon thereafter he landed on Oprah Winfrey's couch to offer a tutorial on the site he'd initially built four years ago. In March the company launched a redesign that a vocal group of users roundly criticized. A few weeks after that chief financial officer Gideon Yu resigned unexpectedly, prompting bloggers to speculate that the company must be readying itself for a public offering.

Meanwhile the site has kept adding users at a rapid clip (the redesign has not kept newcomers away), and analysts are starting to raise questions about just how much Facebook is spending on infrastructure to maintain the large site.

It is hard to know much about Facebook's financial situation, because the company is privately held, and its management team has long been reluctant to address the issue of profits. Until now, executives and investors alike have said they place a priority on adding users and getting them to spend more time on the site. In my February interview with operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, she made it clear that the company was very focused on making money specifically so that it could continue to fund its user growth. And early board member Jim Breyer, who put in $1 million of his own money and $12.7 million from an Accel Partners fund, told me he wasn't demanding or even expecting immediate economic returns, saying profitability is "a key focus but there has never been a very specific time table."

Indeed, the company has a deep well of capital to fund its business. It has raised more than $400 million in financing so far. Its largest investor is Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), which paid $240 million in 2007 for a 1.6% stake in the company, giving Facebook a valuation of about $15 billion. Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing also invested $120 million at the same valuation. (The company's internal valuation as of last June was $3.7 billion.)

But analysts posit that the business itself is becoming increasingly expensive to run. Facebook reports users are uploading more than 850 million photos each day and more than eight million videos. That's a lot of server space.

(And Facebook may not be able to make a return on all those new users. Some 70% of the site's members come from overseas, and many of them hail from countries where there is no real potential for drumming up advertising dollars.)

Will Facebook's 2009 revenues be enough to fund this growth? In 2008, the company brought in an estimated $280 milion. Most of that came directly from banner ads, and a substantial chunk was still coming from a deal with Microsoft in which the Internet behemoth sold traditional banner ads, which cost as little as $0.15 cents per one thousand ads shown to users.

But the company has said that it is on track to beat revenue projections and make 70% more than it did in 2008. In the past year, Facebook has doubled its sales team to more than 130. And a quick scan of the source code for the site's ads would confirm Facebook's assertion that the Microsoft deal accounts for an ever smaller number of the ads the site serves up.

Facebook is in fact seeing positive results with a new ad format it launched last fall, the engagement ad. A good case study comes from Vancouver, Wash.-based pizza restaurant Papa Murphy's, which ran an ad offering a free pizza to anyone who "became a fan" of the restaurant on the Facebook page it created. Users received notifications in their newsfeed and then were directed to the Papa Murphy's Web site to get their pie.

More than 131,000 users became a fan of the national pizza franchise saw traffic to its site jump 253%. And within two weeks, 1,200 people had posted to the site's wall. As Facebook's user base grows, advertisers continue to experiment with these types of ads even as they're pulling back in other areas.

Facebook's popularity seems not to have diminished: the company says more than half of its 200 million active users log on every day. And users spent 178 minutes on the site last month on average, according to Comscore, up 5 % from the previous month.

With so much momentum, will Zuckerberg look to go publlic soon? When Yu left the company, the Wall Street Journal quoted Zuckerberg in an internal memo saying the company would look for a new chief financial officer "with public company experience who can help take us to the next stage in our growth." Indeed, Zuckerberg has always alluded to an IPO, turning down early acquisition offers from large Internet companies. But Zuckerberg isn't revealing his plan. Any speculation as to whether Yu's departure suggests Facebook is hastening its plans is just that: speculation.

Facebook guru says nothing sinister in service terms

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has told his company's 175 million users that the recent changes his company has made to its terms of use have not been implemented for nefarious purposes.


A contentious clause in the social networking site's recently-amended terms of use has raised the ire of some Facebook users. It reads as follows:

"You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service..."

The new terms of use, which were posted to Facebook on February 4, give the social networking site the right to hang onto information posted by users for as long as the site wants -- and even after that information is removed from a user's profile.

Privacy lawyer Brian Bowman told said that some users may want to consider using Canadian-owned social networking sites that must adhere to stricter privacy laws.

"You're probably going to be afforded much better privacy protection in Canada than you will in other countries, such as the United States," he said.

Zuckerberg, in a post published on The Facebook Blog on Monday, explained why the company made the changes it did.

He said the company changed the language of its terms of use because it better described the way the site works.

"When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created -- one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox," Zuckerberg said on The Facebook Blog.

"Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear."

"In reality," Zuckerberg continued in his posting, "we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work."

Zuckerberg said that people want full ownership and control of access to their information, while demanding full access to information that has been passed to them by others, such as email addresses, phone numbers, phone numbers and the like.

"These two positions are at odds with each other," Zuckerman said in his posting. "There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with."

The Facebook founder said his site's users that the contextual issues of privacy and information exchange on the Internet are complex and are constantly "being worked out."

Zuckerman said these issues form "difficult terrain to navigate," but he pledged his company would make efforts to "resolve them very seriously" as they arise in future.

Appraisal pegs value of Facebook at $3.7B

Facebook Inc. quickly concluded it wasn't worth anywhere near the $15 billion US market value implied in a 2007 investment made by Microsoft Corp., according to confidential information obtained Wednesday from court documents.

In a transcript of a June court hearing that was closed to the public, lawyers arguing over a legal settlement revealed Facebook's own appraisal had priced its privately held stock at $8.88 US per share, giving it a market value of about $3.7 billion US.

The Palo Alto-based company relied on the appraisal to value employee stock options fairly and avert possible tax problems.

Facebook, which currently runs the internet's largest social network, made the assessment after striking an October 2007 deal with Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft. As part of a broader advertising partnership with Microsoft, Facebook agreed to sell a 1.6 per cent stake to the software maker for $240 million US.

The Microsoft investment implied Facebook's stock was worth $35.90 per share — a figure that was relied upon in the settlement of a lawsuit that accused the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, of stealing the idea for his online hangout from three former classmates who started another social network called ConnectU.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt declined to comment on any of the figures obtained from the court documents. Microsoft had no immediate comment.

Debate over worth of shares

In last June's court hearing, Facebook's lawyers argued the company's appraisal of its common stock couldn't be held up as an apples-to-apples comparison with the Microsoft investment because the software maker bought Series D preferred stock.

Microsoft also had an incentive to pay a premium for Facebook's stock because it wanted to deepen its ties to the company's popular website, whose worldwide audience of 150 million people could eventually attract billions of dollars in advertising.

Analysts believe Facebook generated somewhere between $250 million US and $300 million US in revenue last year.

Lawyers opposing Facebook said the company cited the $35.90 US per share figure in the settlement negotiations.

Zuckerberg's former classmates — Divya Narendra and twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss — balked at settling the case last March after learning Facebook determined its common stock was worth about one-fourth of the value derived from Microsoft's investment.

U.S. District Judge James Ware decided to enforce the settlement despite ConnectU's contention that it had been misled about the true value of Facebook's stock.

ConnectU's resistance to the settlement triggered widespread speculation about how much Facebook's stock is really worth.

Settlement reached this week

Facebook fought fiercely to keep the details of its market value and the ConnectU settlement under wraps. Before last June's hearing, Facebook lawyers persuaded Ware to remove reporters from a San Jose courtroom so the final details could be hashed out in private.

Large portions of that hearing are redacted in a transcript of the June hearing, but the Associated Press was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document.

Under their settlement, Facebook agreed to pay ConnectU $20 million in cash and 1,253,326 shares of common stock. The stock was worth $45 million US, based on the Microsoft valuation, but only $11 million US under Facebook's own appraisal.

That means ConnectU received anywhere from $31 million US and $65 million US for settling the suit, depending on which stock valuation is used.

Facebook's stock probably is worth even less now because of a severe recession that has decimated the values of companies around the globe.

The $65-million settlement amount has been reported in the media this week, based on information that was inadvertently leaked by a law firm that represented ConnectU in the case against Facebook.

The firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, boasted about the $65 million US figure in a newsletter that was obtained this week by The Recorder, a legal publication.

ConnectU fired Quinn Emanuel before Ware signed off on the Facebook settlement.

Teens on MySpace talking sex, violence

A new study finds that 54 percent of teens talk about behaviors such as sex, alcohol use, and violence on the social networking giant MySpace -- presenting potential risks even if all they're doing is talking, researchers said Monday.
The study looked at MySpace profiles of 500 people who identified themselves as 18-year-old males and females in the United States.

References to risky behaviors included both words and photos, the authors said.

Not all teens who write about risky behaviors in their profiles actually engage in them in real life, says Dr. Megan Moreno of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, one of the authors of the study, which appears in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

They may instead talk about sex, substance use, or violence because they are contemplating doing those things, or because they want to brag without actually doing what they say, Moreno said.

Even if teens have not actually engaged in risky behaviors but merely brag about them online, this can still affect their future behavior, said study co-author Dr. Dimitri Christakis, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital.

"Those who lie about the behaviors to show off may receive positive feedback from others -- comments such as "that's great" or "I do the same thing" -- that encourage them to actually try out the behaviors," he said.

"Apart from that, teens who claim such behaviors are more likely to be victims of bullying and unwanted invitations for sex," he said.

In a second study, Moreno and colleagues identified 190 profiles of 18- to 20-year-olds that contained three or more references to sexual behaviors or substance abuse. The authors then made a profile of their own, called "Dr. Meg," from which they sent a single e-mail to half these profiles, warning them about the risky information and offering information about clinical resources.

They found that, after three months, 42.1 percent of the profile owners who received the e-mail -- and 29.5 percent of those who did not -- either removed references to risky behaviors or made their profiles private.

"It's really not that MySpace is bad or good. I think the lesson is that it's a tool, and how you use it determines the kinds of outcome you're going to get," Moreno said.

Experts say the bottom line is that parents should get more involved in the online lives of their children.

"I tell parents that they should absolutely create their own MySpace and Facebook page," Christakis said. The study inspired him to create his own Facebook account, and his 10-year-old already wants to know about his "friends," he said.

"In some cases, parents should even have their children's passwords for these social networking sites, especially when the children are around age 13 or 14," said Vivian Friedman, child-adolescent psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Friedman was not involved with the study, but she is well aware of the problem. One of Friedman's patients, the daughter of a preacher, posted nude photographs of herself online, a move that cost her father his job, Friedman said.

But she said 54 percent as a figure for profiles with risky behaviors seems too high, given that most of what happens on social networking sites is "chit-chat."

"I have parents that catch their kids bragging about something on MySpace, and when you actually confront them, the kid says 'I really wasn't doing it,' and they can prove they were not at the party where they were supposed to have been drinking," she said.

Beyond keeping a watchful eye on risky interests and pictures, parents should also use social networking sites such as MySpace -- which had about 120 million users as of this summer -- as an opportunity to learn about their childrens' favorite movies and hobbies, as well as their top friends, she said.

"You so often hear parents say 'I don't even know my kid anymore.' Here's a very easy tool to get to know your kid again," she said.

Twitter accounts of Obama, Britney Spears hacked

The Twitter accounts of President-elect Barack Obama, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, Fox News and 29 others were hacked Monday according to the microblog site, leading to false and inappropriate messages being posted on their accounts.

First Fox News Twitter followers read a false message about Bill O'Reilly's sexuality Monday morning after hackers launched several attacks.

Then came the attack on pop princess Britney Spears private parts.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who uses Twitter on his TV show to interact with the audience, also fell victim to the scam, when a hacker posted about drugs on his account.

Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the site's blog that the accounts were compromised after a hacker accessed tools the support team uses when a Twitter user can't remember or wants to reset their login info.

"We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline," Stone said in the blog post. "We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."

Jennifer Dargan, Director of Public Relations for CNN confirmed Sanchez's account was compromised.

"As a result, some Twitter users may have received offensive messages attributed to Rick when the breach occurred," she said. "This is annoying, though such breaches are not uncommon when using social networking sites."

"Rick has notified Twitter of his account's breach and taken some basic steps to secure his account's access. Rick enjoys communicating with viewers via Twitter and he and many others at CNN find social networking a valuable tool in their shows. Rick will continue to use Twitter -- along with MySpace and Facebook -- to engage CNN's audience."

The attacks came after Twitter suffered a vicious phishing scam over the weekend, during which everyday Twitter users may have been tricked into logging on to a page masquerading as the Twitter front page, according to the site.

Instead, users were actually giving out their login information. The fake link was then passed along to anyone following that user.

Twitter posted a small notice on the page of each user warning them about the attacks.

But some users, concerned about the attacks, began messaging Twitter employees.

"So you're OK with a status quo where any Twitter [application] is potentially a phishing scam?" Twitter user "Aral" posted on the account of Alex Payne, a developer at Twitter. According to his Web site Payne is in charge of working with programmers who develop their own applications that work with Twitter.

"I'm certainly not happy with the security status quo. I just want people to understand the different threats. We'll get there," Payne responded.

The attacks are the first known security issues with Twitter, which has grown as a popular social networking site during the last year.

The attack on Twitter indicates hackers may see social networking sites as a good place to try and steal passwords and account information from the most people.

While many of the accounts were fixed quickly by resetting passwords, the attacks are a reminder for Twitter that with increasing popularity comes more security risks.

Those risks have kept employees at Twitter working quickly to try and fend off attacks and fix compromised tools.

The company's CEO Evan Williams echoed that sentiment with a post on his Twitter account this morning.

"Mood at Twitter HQ the first work day of the year: Focused Anxiety."

Find old friends on Facebook

Facebook is a great way to meet up with friends you haven't spoken to in years. Reunite with your old home town friends online or take your old group offline for a reunion. Either way, you can talk about the old days together.
Get started by opening up a Facebook account online. Facebook requires your email address so they can confirm your identity and start you off with a new account. Either use your own name so your old friends can find you or choose an alias ID if you are skeptical about being online.

Next, Fill in your profile as best as you can with some details about yourself. You will want your old friends to be able to find you easily and by putting down details about you, they will! Write down some of your old and present hobbies, old schools, jobs etc. Facebook gives the user the opportunity to search for old friends by keywords.

Uploads some photos of yourself so people can recognize you. You do not have to include photos of yourself or your face, but it is helpful if you want old friends to identify you. Include photos of your travels, favorite places, or of anything you like as long as they remain within the Facebook guidelines.

Write a thorough description about yourself and tell your old friends what you have been up to over the years. Let old friends see your hometown, your present location and what you are doing now. Be personable and friendly with your description. A friendly approach to the Facebook online community is the way to start and rekindle some good friendships.

Finally, Perform a search for old friends by putting in keywords to the search. Put in your old high school, sports teams, clubs or your university class. Put in your home town if you are looking for old friends that were raised in the same town. You can search for any old friend you wish.

Facebook has really helped people in reconnecting with there past. It's been a GREAT help! people that haven't seen each other in years, sometimes decades have found each other on Facebook.

I personally have benefited from Facebook's huge membership base, having searched for a an old friend from my junior high for over 14 years, back when I was younger, the internet wasn't really around, the early years of my search was pretty much searching through phone books, along with hoping to meet a mutual friend somewhere, anywhere (the subway, the street..anywhere) so I could ask them if they knew of her whereabouts.
As the internet grew in popularity, (it didn't really take off until I was around 23-24) not having had any luck with my old phone book search, and not having really met anyone with any good information they could give me, I then used Yahoo, then Altavista, then Google, entering her name into searches multiple times over the years in the hopes that i'd be able to locate her, nothing really ever came up.

Then finally, along came Facebook, and although it didn't hit me right away to search for her on there, I finally got it (hey, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer..but things eventually do come to me!) I entered her name into the search hit search...waited for my slow wireless connection (that never seems to want to work properly right when I want it to) to load the results page.. Sucess!! it found one...but was it her? I mean, several people can have the same name right? it looked like her, but its also been 14 years (aged a heck of a lot better then I did!!!) I sent a message...and waited... and waited...and waited.... a good 2 and a half weeks went by before I got a reply (women really do love to make guys wait, don't they?) the email confirmed that it was in fact her, and my search was over (finally).

Thankfully, she remembered who I was... we got re-acquainted somewhat over the next little while, I was in the best of moods that I had been in, in several years.

We met up for a coffee, I have to tell you, my heart was beating 1000x a minute when I first heard her voice and saw her again...
She was now a mother of 2 adorably beautiful little girls (they took after there mother for sure).... and was engaged to be married.

We would continue talking for a few weeks more before she and her husband to be decided that it was best that she and I no longer continue our friendship.

Maybe not the ending I was forseeing all those years I searched for her, but I was glad that I had at least found her again and my search had come to an end after all that time and I was happy to see that she found happiness, I wouldn't have to wonder what happened to her and if she was happy any longer.

To close off this posting, You know who you are, I don't know if you'll ever read this... But I want you to know that even though we no longer converse, I still do think of you.. Congratulations on the wedding.

Until next time....