The Interconnected World

I started Five Across because I thought that Instant Messaging was a very primitive technology with a lot of promise, and I saw a way to dramatically improve it. In just six months I have learned an amazing amount about the interconnected world we live in, which is exploding like the first galaxies, at an incredible rate of speed, headed in every direction at the same time.

Blogs are part of it. Messaging is part of it. Email is part of it. Even FTP and SSH are part of it. The internet is here to stay, and the wires now are everywhere, in all of our homes, in our collective consciousness. Even the African subcontintent is blossoming with bloggers, as a Stanford Fellow friend from South Africa is helping to make it happen.

We at Five Across intend to change the world, or at least part of it. I had a hand in changing the world at Apple Computer, where I was the driving force behind iMovie and iPhoto. Those applications are personal, consumer-oriented media tools, but their purpose is to share your life with friends and family, and when we added the Share tab to iPhoto, it changed everything.

People live and work in teams, in groups, and we're building that right into the core of the Five Across network. It isn't just a menu item, it's an architecture, and it's incredibly powerful. We hope you'll check it out, use it, love it, and recommend it to your friends and co-workers.