by Sharon Early

Created on: August 10, 2011   Last Updated: April 10, 2012

Twitter, Tagged, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Orkut, myLot, online social networks, the list goes on and on and on some more. Social networking is an advertising and marketing goldmine. Many companies both large and small have constructed profiles on social networks. Then they post buttons on all of their websites so that you can like or friend them on their social networking page. Which then gives them access to the front page of your profile for all of their tweets, comments, and advertisements. Friending your favorite brand of soda pop or clothing lines is not a real friendship, not even a true online friendship, however friending and liking businesses, companies, and brands makes up a large majority of the friending and bookmarking that occurs on social networks.

Then there are the real people on social networks who construct a profile populated with the things that they are passionate about, or even just about their lives in general. A lot of the people are reaching out, looking for people in diverse places who share their interests and who they can discuss these things with. There are some people who create lifelong connections with people that they only knw online. To them these types of friendships can be as real and fraught with emotional landmines as any other interpersonal relationship.

Friendships are built upon mutual interests, communication, and sharing parts of your life with one another, not on sharing geographic locale with one another. Getting to know other people in other states, provinces, or even other countries is a good thing. By having friends from everywhere you will become much more worldly and will develop an understanding of how life is for your contemporatries in other countries and places. If you have friends online whom you talk to about any number of things all the time, with whom you share experiences and confidences and whom you care about and vice versa then in my opinion your social networking friends may really be friends. Not all of them of course but those with whom you take the time to develop a friendship.

For those with friend lists in the hundreds are aiming for quantity, not quality "friendships". Most of the people that they have friended on the social network they don't even know, rarely or never speak to, and they are just an undifferentiated unit of their friend count. These people may even have a few friends whom they have built a relationship with, to the degree that they are friends, however there is no way to actually be friends with hundreds of people that you don't even know.

Saying that social networking friends are really friends is akin to having a huge party at your house and letting all of your friends bring anyone else that they want with them and then saying that all of the peple at the party are your friends. You may have a few friends and aquaintances in among the crowd however real and true friends are more than likely few and far apart just as real and true friends can often be few and far apart. It is really hard to find people that you "connect" with and can really nd truly consider friends so if you find a friend on Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site don't let anyone discount your friendship as being somehow less than any other kind of friendship just because you found each other on a social networking website.

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