by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 21, 2009

There are two extremely successful ways in which we can make new friends online, ones with similar tastes and interests to ourselves. We can either browse the Web and attempt to find such people or we can create full and interesting profiles for ourselves in a variety of locations in the hope that they will come to us.

Social networking sites are the obvious place to start looking for new friends online. Sites such as MySpace allow us to browse for people by geographical location, sex and age, as well as what they are looking for from and in online acquaintances. They also have interest groups, which we can join and post to in an attempt to find others who share similar life interests to ourselves. They have blogging areas which we can search and find people who are writing to subjects which we enjoy. We can even perform searches for people who are online at that time, as there is little point in contacting someone whom we may not realise hasn't even signed in to their account for over a year!

We can also look to joining internet forums regarding subjects which are of interest to us, posting upon them and getting to know people in this fashion. This is an excellent way of finding people who do have something very specific in common with us and establishing a very firm basis for a developing friendship.

There are of course sites such as Friendfinder.com whose whole purpose is putting people in touch with one another for friendship. One drawback of these sites, however, is that a great many of them are devoted to people who are looking for the romantic form of friendship. If this is what we too are looking for, all good and well, so long as we are aware of this situation in the first instance.

The second way of finding new friends online is to post detailed and interesting profiles regarding ourselves and our interests around the Web. That can of course be on any of the sites mentioned above but equally can be any site or blog to which we have access. Self-promotion around the Web is a great way of perhaps attracting readers to your blog or site as well as perhaps making new friends in the longer term. Sites even such as Helium - the site upon which you are reading this article - have an "About Me" page available to every writer on the site for precisely this purpose.

Safety is something we have to be extremely conscious of, sadly, when looking to make new friends online. We are essentially in the first instance taking someone completely at face value in terms of their age, their interests, what they look like in that any photograph they post is indeed of them, and even their sex. We should therefore be extremely careful about giving out personal information to such new contacts too soon. Communicate through the safe mode in the site upon which you met in the early stages of your friendship. Be wary of giving out personal information such as your e-mail address, phone number, or particularly your address, too soon. There are a lot of unscrupulous people online looking to take advantage of others - or worse!

In a similar sense, if you are contemplating meeting up with your new friend in person, make sure that you do so initially in a very public place, at a time when said place is likely to be busy with other people, and ensure that your new friendship gets off to the best possible start.

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