(This is a guest author article.)

There's a time when I was an active member of more than half a dozen internet communities. Of the four or five years since I've had non-dial-up based internet connections (I cannot, in honesty, call it broad-band) my internet usage has sky-rocketed. There were times when I literally counted the seconds as I logged in to my e-mail account and logged out. I was so aware of my internet usage that I hardly got online for more than five or ten minutes at a stretch. That kind of thing really didn't promote what we take for granted today - blogging, social networking, file sharing (especially video sharing) and discussion groups/forums. As far as I was concerned, the internet was a medium for information exchange. If I had a particularly big document to browse online, I saved it for off-line reading and disconnected as soon as I could. Ah… the days

Times have changed since. The broadband explosion (or fraudband explosion - depending on which part of the world you live in) has really captured a new generation of audience with its own set of priorities and applications. More than being an information-providing tool, the internet has become a social phenomenon. But I have to ask: are we over-estimating the "social" part of it?

I can only answer this question at a personal level. I've never been a keen participant on the so-called Web 2.0 social networking sites like MySpace or Orkut (even though I did create an Orkut account to rediscover my old school mates). Somehow the idea of "friendship" with total strangers has never appealed to me. More than that, I saw nothing new or innovative in the ideas themselves - it was all about improvements to the underlying technology. What fun is a community of total strangers with whom you can hardly relate even if it showcases the most dazzling technology and features?

But what I find from the little I see of Social Networks is that there is a distinct focus on the technology of the platform rather than the people who make them work. On the other hand, informal social networks which don't depend on any particular service or website, are far more reliable. I mean, the good old fashioned way of developing and nurturing relationships through contacts. I think the point I'm trying to make is that while these social networking tools are a useful device in organizing contacts and finding new people (Orkut is nothing more than a spiced-up contact-list in my book), you still have to invest time and effort in developing contacts. Numbers don't count - it's the relationship that counts. After the initial effort I spent in setting up my "friends" list in Orkut, I've not really done anything about it. I simply couldn't relate - even to those school-mates - on a personal level after all these years. On the other hand, even though RT and I don't belong to any formal community network, we have become the best of friends even though I've never met him in real life.

But because the internet is so technology-driven, people only talk about the technology which drives social networking. And that is the easiest part. I can count on the fingers of my two hands, the number of friends I've made in over 4 years of being online. That's because the internet is like a very, very large gallery or auditorium where people walk in and walk out every second of the day. There is simply no way to judge a person in a short space of time. Besides all that, most people just disappear after a while, so any effort you may have invested in relating to them will be wasted. The point is Google or Yahoo! will not talk about these aspects of social networking. They provide you the tools to make it work and then expect that they will work. Nobody is really thinking about the quality of a social-network - it's all about the numbers. People think "if you have more than 500 friends in your contacts lists, you must be a pretty popular guy" without questioning whether those 500 friends are really anything more than momentary acquaintances.

Obviously social-networking is the big thing today. What I'd really be interested to see is where they are 5 years from now. That's because the novelty would have worn off and people will slowly realize the incredible amount of junk information produced by such networking. Already 9 out of 10 non-spam messages in my e-mail inbox is from community notifications or e-mail forwards. Maintaining a presence in such online communities without getting back anything significant in return will slowly lead people back to good old-fashioned communication in the real world. It's a bit like e-mail in the beginning. When we first started adding contacts to our mailing accounts, we hardly realized that we would be flooded with spam in the months and years to come. I think a lot of us experimented with a variety of e-mail services and then decided that the effort of maintaining so many accounts was not worth it. So we picked one service and stuck with it. Something similar will happen with Web 2.0 social networking. Just as the realization dawned on us that there's no "instant" about e-mail communication, I think people will realize that there's no magic about social networking.

In short, there are really no short-cuts to making friends.