martes, 7 de abril de 2015

New on Disability.Blog: Inspired to Connect

By Guest Blogger Wayne Connell, Founder and President, Invisible Disabilities Association (IDA)
Yes, I’m one of the 72 percent of online adults who visit Facebook at least once a month. Actually, I check my Facebook multiple times a day. There were more than 1.4 billion active Facebook users worldwide as of January 28 and more than 890 million use it daily. And of course I use Twitter too, along with the 288 million other users sending 500 million tweets a day, according to Twitter’s statistics page.
I founded the Invisible Disabilities® Association in 1996 and we launched our first website in 1997. The Internet, or World Wide Web, was just getting started. Yet we had twenty- to twenty-five thousand people a month visit our site. Why so many? I believe that people living with illness and pain were trapped in their homes and the Internet became a window to the world for them.
In 1999, we launched our first online community on Yahoo groups and the Invisible Disabilities® Community (IDC) was born. IDC became a place to share the triumphs and tragedies of life with people who were on similar journeys. In 2007, we moved the community to the Ning platform, which was like a private MySpace. The community grew to more than 4,500 during the next seven years.
“I joined [the IDA Social Network] soon after I had to quit work and it saved my life. To this day (over 5 years later) I still maintain friendships that span the country (no, the world). It is a website that values your feelings and your privacy.” – Jane

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