I’m on a futuristic nostalgia trip, courtesy of iTunes, after downloading Joe Cocker doing “With a Little Help from My Friends” and playing it a few dozen times. No flashbacks here. (I was way too pregnant to go to Woodstock.) More of a flashforward. But I digress.

What was cool about the sixties was how people helped each other, or at least thought they were doing it as they passed around the pipe of enlightenment. If Lennon & McCartney said it was true, well you know it was.

But if you consider the ‘mass’ of helping that went on in 1969 vs the ‘mass’ of helping that happened in the past twelve months, I’d bet that there is more person-to-person ‘help mass’ now. Even if only a tiny fraction of a percent of a year’s worth of tweets (50 billion or so, and growing) helps someone, that’s still a lot.

Think about it. Have you been helped in any way by social media? How did you pay it forward? And most important, did you let that person know they helped you?