Facebook friends not the real deal

LONELY GEEKS seeking friends from social notworking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are on a hiding to nowhere according to a British boffin.

Dr Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University said that, despite the myth, there is no way a human being will trust someone until they have actually met them. He confirmed to AFP that all those people who say they are your friends on Facebook and Myspace are actually lying. Playing around with them will not help fill that pitiful, painful, empty void which is your sad lonely soul as you journey onwards towards a death alone, Reader said, or least words to that effect.

Such friends are about the same number of people you would probably meet in real world contact. In the real world you would not count any of them as friends, unless you were really, really drunk.

Humans see face-to-face contact as "absolutely imperative" in building close relationships and that it was "very easy to be deceptive" over the Internet, Reader said.

Reader cited a study from the early 1990s, where boffins at Liverpool University in northwest England conducted research which suggested that most people have around 150 friends and acquaintances, but only five close friends.

He thinks that this percentage is probably true of users of social networks.

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