Social networking

In the midst of an archaeological dig amongst the piles on my messy desk this morning, I found a not-yet-used 2008 calendar from Papyrus. When I glanced at the celebrations of the year, I discovered that today is Long Lost Friend Day.

 

I don’t know who started it---Hallmark or Papyrus, I suspect. But it’s really a nice reminder of the warm fuzzies you feel when you reconnect with someone from your past. In the old days, before the internet, if you lost touch with a person you had to hire a private investigator but now there are so many electronic tools that make it easy to find people from your past. Admittedly, if your female friend has changed her surname, it makes the search a bit more challenging.

Want to find a long lost friend? Here are some ways to begin looking:

• Try finding the person using Google by putting her first name and last name in quotes. See what comes up. If you know the city and/or state where she lives or last lived, you can refine the search by putting that after her name in quotes.
• Check out groups from your high school or college on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace.
• Search for former classmates on sites like Reunion.com or Classmates.com---or email or phone the alumni office of your school.
• Let your fingers do the walking---use the white pages directory on switchboard.com.
• No luck finding her in a directory? Are her parents or other relatives findable? Chances are they may still live in the same town she did. Try finding their phone numbers or email addresses.
• If you don’t know any relatives, you could try the friend-of-a-friend route. Do you know someone who knew her that you are still in touch with and who may be easier to find?
• Any clue to the kind of work she is doing? Perhaps, you can find her through LinkedIn, a professional association, or the human resources office of her former place of employment.

Even better than digging: If you develop a blog or personal website, your old friends may come out of the woodwork looking for you. I was so delighted to hear from some of my childhood friends who serendipitously found me.

Have any of you successfully reconnected with retro friends? Please post your stories---and I hope you will reach out and touch somebody whose friendship has been meaningful to you. Oh, Happy Long Lost Friend Day! (Any and all suggestions for de-cluttering my desk are welcome too.)

Have you ever poached a friend or had one poached from you? This is how it happens: Your friend introduces you to her friend and the two of you develop a friendship---independent of the friend who introduced you. If you’ve been there, done that, you’re a poacher. Or if you have introduced two friends and one of them snares the other for herself, leaving you in the dust, you’ve been poached.

Is it ethically wrong to become a ‘friend of a friend’ or is it a legitimate way to expand your friendship network? What are the rules and could they be changing?

CNN.com recent ran an article called, When social poachers snatch your friends, that posed both sides of the issue. Through one lens, poaching can be viewed as the ultimate betrayal, akin to “friend-napping.” Through another, it can be seen as a reasonable way of making new friends through vetted introductions.

A 2004 essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld in New York Magazine, Our Mutual Friend, expressed the jealousy and hurt the author experienced after she had been poached. When she learned that her two friends were planning a ski trip together---without her---she felt excluded (even though she had no interest in skiing). It harked back to the days of junior high school.

I’ve been poached, too. I had two close friends, let’s call them Marcie and Hayley, whom I decided to introduce to one another. I knew they would instantly “click” because they had so much in common: neither worked outside the home, both loved competitive tennis, and each had two kids around the same ages. It was a good hunch because they soon became best friends with each other as I drifted into the background.

Admittedly, the first time I bumped into them at Starbuck’s having coffee without me, I felt a bit strange and awkward, even hurt, but as soon as I regrouped mentally I realized that I didn’t have as much time or motivation to spend with either one of them as they did with each other. Now we get together as a threesome occasionally. Rosenfeld also found that being poached can be a blessing in disguise. Prior to the treachery, she had found herself in the unpleasant role of constantly ministering to one of the women who was needy and always crying on her shoulder. It gave her a way out.

With the booming popularity of social network sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, the ethics and etiquette of friend poaching may be turning upside down. In cyberspace, becoming a friend of a cyber-friend is not only socially acceptable, but is actually one of the raison d’êtres of participation.

Being poached offline isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. Because friendships change over time, a friendship that is 'stolen' may have long been gone. It may offer the poachee an opportunity to change, take a break from, or get rid of a friendship that was draining, all-consuming, or toxic in other ways.

The corollary: Don’t feel guilty about poaching. Unlike family or marriage, friendships have no blood or legal ties; the good ones are totally voluntary relationships that enhance our lives. Feel guilty? Remember that your new friend has the free will to add, subtract, or realign her friendships.

One caveat: Friend poaching is unacceptable, and maybe even pathological, when an individual consistently tries to derail friendships and hurt people around her.

An article by Stephanie Rosenbloom in yesterday’s New York Times, On Facebook, Scholars Link Up with Data, explains how the popular social networking site is increasingly being used by academic researchers to study friendships.

Rosenbloom quotes Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor: “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.” While there are legitimate concerns that some of the 58 million Facebook may not know their habits and preferences are being tracked, never before have social scientists had such a fertile source of information to mine on the nature of our friendships.

As one example, the article mentions that researchers at Harvard and UCLA are using Facebook to examine the concept of triadic closure: whether your friends are friends of one another. Although the phenomenon was first described by a sociologist named Georg Simmel as long as a century ago, there were few empirical studies. Using Facebook as a laboratory, social scientists are studying triadic closure---which one day may shed light on the exclusionary social cliques that draw circles keeping some people in and others out.

Given the importance of friendship in our lives, used well, Facebook and other such social networking sites could potentially yield important information on how to build and sustain healthy relationships.

Some people worry that digital technology is eroding the face of friendship as we now know it---that time spent in virtual relationships detracts from real ones. A new report provides evidence to the contrary. Among Americans:

• 48 percent of those interviewed said that social networking sites help them build new relationships

• 44 percent said that social networking sites help them maintain current relationships

This social effect cuts across age groups:...

No surprise. People on Facebook are consumed with friendship, BFFs, besties, and like to rank their friends. Hmmm….wonder how I got there?

An article in this week’s Australian PC World ranks Top Friends (developed by Slide) as the top Facebook application. Among 46 million active users on the site, more than 3 million have signed on to Top Friends as daily users. (That’s about 15% of the total Facebook user base)...

Female college students are twice as likely as their male peers to use social networking sites like Facebook (their favorite) and MySpace (ranked second), according to a market research survey from Anderson Analytics. The findings, reported in Advertising Age this week, examined the likes, dislikes, and media preferences of college students between the ages of 18 and 24. The same article mentioned that older women are more reticent than younger ones about networking with each other and sharing information on the internet...

There is a lot to learn about friendships from what has been called the "largest-ever global survey" of how kids interact with digital technology. MTV and Nickelodeon, in association with Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, used both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to talk to 18,000 “tech-embracing” kids (ages 8-14) and young people (14-24) in 16 countries.

The findings from the Circuits of Cool/Digital Playground study found...

Canadian Jenny Bullough calls her blog The Newbie: The adventures of a wide-eyed innocent in the digital world. Since I’m a bit of a newbie to the blogosphere myself, I was interested to read Jenny’s take on Redefining Friendship.

She writes: “I'm stoked to be going shopping in Second Life twice in the next few days -- tonight for skins, and Monday with the After a Fashion gang for bikinis. Not just because I've been hankering for a new skin, and a bikini to properly show it off, but because it gives me a chance to socialize with my dear friends Eden and Kate.”

If you’ve been living under a rock like me and haven’t signed on or even heard about it yet, Second Life (SL) is a 3-D virtual world that has enticed more than 7 million members from around the globe since it was created in late 2006...

When it comes to social networking sites, like Facebook or MySpace, things are largely black or white, says blogger Nancy Baym.

On her blog, Online fandom, Baym remarks: “One of the great shortcomings of social network sites as they currently exist is that almost all of them offer you only one kind of friend. It’s binary — you’re a friend or you aren’t...

A report of the Pew Internet & American Life Project looked at online friendships among American youth between the ages of 12 and 17. One of many interesting findings: There were gender differences in the ways the sites were used. Girls used them to reinforce existing friendships; boys used them to flirt and make new friendships.

The researchers found that more than half (55 percent) of the 935 youth they interviewed visit such popular social networking sites as Facebook and MySpace.