It’s hard for me to watch the coverage of the fires burning in Southern California right now because it brings back memories of my own personal experience with out of control wildfires.

For all of our talk about social networking and how it is changing politics, today we were treated to an up close and personal example of how social networking is changing our most basic social interactions.

Within hours of the tragedy that occurred today at Virginia Tech, ABC News had published a story entitled “If You're OK, Please Update Your Profile” which quoted someone named Carlos 'Mohawk Monday' Fernandez asking, “Many of us are all worried about our friends, so lets do this. If you are okay! Please update your status in facebook to say something like ‘I'm okay’.”

With cell phones spotty because of the massive volume of calls, and concrete information even more scarce, Facebook became a vital way of letting family, friends, and even strangers know that you were OK.