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Online Friends: The New Trading Cards.

I'm a member of so many online social networks I've lost count. Networks such as myspace, Hi5, Flickr, YouTube, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo etc. What's common to all of them is that people will request you become their friend and then, after you accept, they'll never communicate with you again. Why?

I have a theory that people on these networks collect friends like kids collect trading cards. The more friends you have the cooler you must be. There are people on these various networks that have over 1000 friends. I bet they only ever talk directly to maybe, at a stretch, twenty of them on a regular basis.

What further reinforces this idea of friends being like trading cards is the buzz you get when someone, who you know is really popular on the network, asks to be your friend or accepts your friend request. Now you can impress people more by saying that person is your friend.

I don't have many friends on any of the networks I'm a member of because I rarely make requests to other people to become my friend. When I do it's usually because it is someone I actually know in some way and not just some random person I found in a profile search.

The majority of friends I do have are randoms. People who sent a request to me. Some day I'm going to take the time to message them to find out who they are but for now they're pretty much trading cards in my friends list.
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Comments

  1. AnonymousJuly 30, 2007 8:48 PM

    Most of my 'friends' on MySpace, contacted me too. The only people I have contacted for a friend have been family, and Jon Lewis the 6pr radio announcer and one bloke who comes from West Yorkshire (Stewart) same as me, and not far away.

    He has met over 10,000 celebrities since the 60s, and has the slideshow on his profile to prove it with a picture of him with each celeb! This also includes a picture of a newspaper aticle about him.

    ReplyDelete

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