BYTE MARKS
Hawai'i networking takes to the Web

By Burt Lum

Wherever you go, if you meet someone from Hawai'i, you'll always have something to talk about.

There's a connection and common bond that exists. I remember how before I went to college, my advisers would tell me to meet "other" people, i.e., people not from Hawai'i.

That's not bad advice for recent grads heading off to Mainland colleges, but when I look back at it, my lasting friendships all had Hawai'i ties, and the most fun I had always involved local braddahs.

So it doesn't surprise me that when a couple of braddahs, Dave Kozuki (formerly with Sprint) and Keith Kamisugi (formerly of Verizon) found themselves both in the Bay Area, they would hook up.

If you're in college, you'd call it the Hawai'i Club. But if you're a graduate and have a little marketing experience, you would call it the Global Pau Hana, or GPH.

Kozuki started the GPH as a social gathering for Hawai'i folks. It grew into a networking event and sprouted gatherings in other cities besides the Bay Area, including Seattle, Los Angeles and Tokyo.

Back in 2003, when Keith turned me on to the social-networking site Ryze, I thought it would be cool to have something like this just for Hawai'i. Obviously, others had the same idea, and in October last year, I started hearing rumblings about an online version of GPH.

They must have had something cooking with their programmers in India, www.gwwindia.com/gph, because eight months later, GPH is online as a fully-featured social-networking site, www.globalpauhana.org. It's got guestbook features like Ryze does, community building like Orkut, and a clean interface like Friendster.

In May, I started getting notices from GPH online from friends building their friends list.

Where this goes remains to be seen. Postings from Hawai'i businesses looking to fill positions are starting to appear. If the site seeds connections socially and professionally, that is also a good thing.

As I have observed in other social-networking sites, it still boils down to real-world, face-to-face nurturing. And I know for a fact we are good at that in Hawai'i. ;-)

Burt Lum is one click away at www.brouhaha.net.