You Gotta Have Friends

Dear friends,

Thank you for your patience while I’ve been silent. I’m feeling much better now. Later this week, I have another guest post by Allan Cockerill to share with you, but for today I thought I’d see if I remember how to write. Plus, I really wanted to say thank you to my friends who have stepped in to help while I’ve been absent.

A few years back, when I found out I was pregnant with J, I was put on modified bed rest due to a back injury a year earlier. I could do some stuff, but housework and most other things fell to Ken and W (who was 4 at the time). I was amazed at the friends who came to help, doing everything from actually cleaning my house (hubbies and 4 yr olds don’t usually meet the same standards) to bringing by home-cooked meals, to following me to the gas station and pumping gas for me. One friend would even bring the garbage can to the curb for me if Ken was out of town.

Friends off-line are wonderful. What I never expected though, was to have the same treatment online. Allan Cockerill of Coffee with Allan Cockerill and Ange of Buzzing with Ange both wrote guest posts, and Marc of techne-eikon.com reminded me that he’s promised to write one also.

Thanks so much, all of you! I don’t have words to express how much your friendship and help has meant to me.

Friendship has been on my mind a lot lately. Social websites brought people together who most likely wouldn’t hang out on traditional forums or chat rooms, for example, among my friends online there are people of all ages, and some who are painfully shy, introverts, people with dyslexia, autism, etc. Sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc. make it easy to find others with interests similar to your own, while allowing you to choose the level of interaction you’re comfortable with.

For most of the social sites, you don’t even need to have friends online to start, just sign up and start playing with the site options…friends will come…like writing a blog, people will come to see what you have to say, and if they like it, they’ll stay. Before you know it, you’ll have a whole group of new friends on the site, most with similar interests to your own.

Twitter is one of the few exceptions to this, one of the rare sites where you really do need friends to enjoy it. It’s not hard to make Twitter friends, but it can be slow starting out. If you are trying to get started on Twitter, feel free to add me as a friend. I’d love to know that you visited my blog too, if you want to send me a message.

I sometimes hear people describe off-line friends as “real” and on-line as “virtual.” To me, all my friendships are real, regardless of whether I see them face to face, visit them on a social site, or send letters to a penpal. I wouldn’t even know how to draw a line…perhaps because I met my husband in a chat room and one of my best friends off line was introduced to me by one of my best friends online.

How about you? Is there a difference in your offline and online friendships? What are your thoughts on online friendships and social networks? I’d love to hear them.