Are online friends “real friends”?

I was a little amused that Plaxo (an online calendar/address book/organiser service) sent me an email to let me know that somebody I knew had joined their service. I clicked on the link and was presented with the following options.

You can choose between Business Network, Family or Friend. Though the suggested text beside ‘Friend’ is more than a tad condescending, especially for what is essentially a service for connecting and sharing information online.

Your real life friends. (Not your “social networking friends”)

But wait, there’s still more…!

Further down on the same screen:

Pulse is for real relationships. Please do not spam people you don’t know with unwelcome connection requests.

How do you know if a request is ‘unwelcome’ before you send it? Isn’t that the point of the exercise, to give the other person the opportunity to accept or deny the request at their discretion?

I hear the expression ‘IRL friends’ all the time. I understand the desire to differentiate between those relationships in daily life and those that exist online. I understand that there are different dimensions and dynamics to both. What I struggle with though is the implication that friendships formed online are in some way inferior, trivial or ‘unreal.’ If anything, I tend to think these relationships can be much more meaningful to the extent that they’re based on shared passions, interests and beliefs, rather than just the stuff of circumstance – a shared city, workplace, demographic.

Psychology aside, I do worry about the longevity of a web based service that would begrudge such relationships. As it is my friend, the new user of that service, didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories provided and I sort of gave up and closed the window. I don’t really use Plaxo anyway…

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Once upon a time on a video sharing website called YouTube, a woman relayed a tale about a man she met briefly in a Sydney cafe. Apparently he had a bit of a ‘silver slipper’ moment (with apologies to Cinderella) and left his jacket behind. The woman apparently concerned for the man and the welfare of his jacket decided to make a video about it. She set up a hotmail email address so that the man could get in touch with her, be reunited with the jacket and (one hallucinates) they could ride off into the sunset together.

Or something…

The whole thing was a hoax perpetuated by fashion company Witchery to draw attention to their new men’s range. The woman in the video hit the traditional media trail talking to any newspaper, television and radio outlets that would listen, each time denying that the video campaign was anything about what it appeared to be. (Both the fashion company and advertising company representing them towed the same official line.)

I was listening to a panel of people assembled from the advertising industry discussing this campaign and its ramifications on The Gruen Transfer. I was genuinely dumbfounded by some of the opinions expressed by these ‘experts’ when it came to the internet and its users.

[The Gruen Transfer: Season 2 Episode 2 - 25/03/2009]

These quotes come directly from the transcript of this particular episode from ABC Television.

Bridget Taylor:

I think this worked really well on line because on line people in that space, people are used to be tricked and they don’t mind and eh and if if Heidi had have stayed on line and leave it up to the bloggers is it fake, is it real, doesn’t matter, this but what they did wrong was they made this fake person into a real person who came out and said oh I’m real, it’s true and that that bit was totally wrong.

Russel Howcroft:

No, because you know we’re in the age of social media and we’re in the age of people just getting engaged with these things for the sake of it. We’re also in the age where the media picks these things up and that is the core of the idea. The absolute core of what’s going on here is to create media noise.

Internet users don’t mind being tricked and are into social media engagement ‘for the sake of it’?

What do you think?

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• Are Online Friends “Real Friends”?