A friend in need is a friend indeed, unless of course you meet them on the internet. Internet social networking sites have made it possible to have millions of friends, but don't count on any of them if you need a hand.
Sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo are now so pervasive they may be changing the nature of human relationships, Sheffield Hallan University's Dr Will Reader suggested at the British Association for the Advancement of Science festival in York.
Before the internet a person might manage having 150 acquaintances and perhaps five very close friends. Now they can maintain thousand of friendships over these sites, Dr Reader stated.
There is an evolutionary advantage to having friends because there is safety in numbers, he said.
"But making friendships is risky because it takes a long time and when you need them to help you out, they mightn't."
This doesn't seem to apply to social networking sites where becoming a "friend" demands little more than inclusion on someone else's friends list. And building up this list has become very important for many networking site users.
A species known as a "MySpace whore" has emerged, a person who wants to accumulate the greatest number of friends possible, Dr Reader said. Some count their friends in the millions.
Of course this opens up the possibility of the latest internet insult, the possibility of being "defriended", being deleted from a networker's list of friends. You know you have been dropped and so too will others lucky enough to stay on the list once your name disappears.
Dr Reader conducted a number of studies to see to what degree user behaviour was changing. "What we predicted and actually found is although the number of friends people have on these sites is high, the actual number of close friends remains the same."
A full 90 per cent of respondents indicated that close friendships only exist on a face to face basis. "People see face to face contacts as being essential to develop close relationships," he stated.
Only "weak ties" formed over the internet. "Nearly all of [ survey respondents] kept close friends on a face to face basis.
"The nice thing is this is bringing back a kind of social side to internet use," Dr Reader added. A few years ago the internet provided solitary surfing. Now you can get out there and "meet" new friends.
