A friend e-need is a friend e-deed

The United States can be a haven for loners. You can spend days without making any human contact. You can withdraw money at an ATM, fill in gas at unmanned gas stations, and use self-checkout grocery stores. Neighbours and colleague will pretty much leave you alone if you don’t want to socialise and want to dedicate your life to becoming the Unabomber or a serial killer.Couple of years back a young man spent an entire year living out his life ''online'' without physical human contact.
It can also be the friendliest country on earth. Strangers will greet you with a cheery ''hi'' or just nod in an unspoken greeting when they pass by. It’s okay to strike up conversation with anyone on just about anything, usually starting with the weather or the day''s football or baseball game. On a jogging trail it''s bad form not to greet a person running in the opposite direction even if you are out of breath. Rarely does anyone step into an elevator and not greet the other person.
But now a new craze is sweeping across America and its electronic class, the country’s premier isolationists. It''s called online networking. In recent months, several Internet sites have sprung up that allow you to link up with friends of your friends, or friends of friends of friends – who might otherwise be strangers who you will never meet physically – in an intricate network that can be tapped for anything from business deals to jobs to dates to common interests.
Here''s how it works. You sign up at any of these sites such as Friendster.com, Tribe.net, Linkedin, Friendzy, MySpace, MeetUp, MixerMixer etc. You invite your immediate friends circle to join in, and urge them to get their friends to join in, who will in turn get their friends to sign-up and so on. Before you know it you have created a vast network of hundreds of immediate circle of friends, thousands of friends'' friends you can tap into and, as in the case of Friendster, a 3 million strong community.
What happens thereafter depends on the site. On some – typically, the personal networking sites -- you could write directly to a networked member explaining the connection and taking it up from there (I notice you are in Y’s friends circle and Y knows X and I am a friend of X etc). On others, especially professional networking sites like linkedin, you need an introduction from your friend X to "talk" to Y.
Most of the sites are free. But you can''t run these things on fresh air. So there is already a debate on how to "monetize" the sites. Venture capitalists have ploughed in $ 13 million into Friendster, hoping that it will be the next big thing. Marketers and advertisers are trying to figure out if there are communities with common interests where they can sell things. Whatever''s going to happen to the personal introduction and the good old handshake? Worse may be in store. Soon we could be having a chip on the shoulder -- and elsewhere.