For whom am I writing this post? Who are the readers? This post has been re-drafted five times, and only the people mentioned before are to blame. This is my personal space, my personal diary, why should I write what they want to read?

Explosion of social networking sites have done something similar. Facebook sends updates to all my friends of each and every click I perform. Many other sites, including Yahoo! Connection Updates are following the same thing. All this is no doubt increasing the amount of time people spend on these sites – people sit and read what their friends are doing, people read about the girl they’ve a crush upon, and whom she talks to, people sit and mock how stupid some of their classmates or room-mates are behaving, and so on.

These social networks don’t aim to bring people closer. There is no formula to do so. All they want is more and more people registering for their service and using it. The more number of people use them, the more advertisements they can show, and the more money they can make.

I fear saying hello to my dear friend on her ‘wall’ or ‘scrapbook’, because it sends a notification to the remotest contacts, that I’ve sent her a message, a scrap or even a poke! I can’t imagine how awkward it’d get if one of those contacts was my dad or mom or little sister. I’ve a couple of hundred contacts in my friend-list on each social networking site, but still I can count the total friends I have, on fingers of my right hand. My phone book is full of numbers, but I can’t figure out even one number to call when am lonely.

We’re living in a world of cyber interaction, and its only ironic that we love the theme of our new facebook, but – the rising sun, the sea shore, the midnight moon – all these are the same old for us. “Did you checkout the new Yahoo! Homepage?” is more commonly heard than “Isn’t the rising sun so very beautiful?“. By the way, check out the new Yahoo! homepage, its really cool.

The platform of chatting gives us immense ease of interaction. We can speak our heart out without any fear, as we remain mostly anonymous. We can act stupid, reveal our darkest secrets, or just talk and have fun, who cares? We fall in love with our chat friend (platonic love), we want to see him/her everyday. Whom do we really love actually? Its just a sleek looking contact icon, or perhaps her way of typing sentences, or his witty jokes! Whatever happens, you’re not a part of their lives offline – never can be.

Everyone of us goes and meets their net friends once in a while. Its fun too, but if you look closer, its awkward. If not awkward, its a really short lived, pleasant but formal meeting. In your head, you want to run away, and sit in front of Yahoo! Messenger, and talk to that icon – in text mode. This in-person thing, the voice, the interaction, the body language, the looks – its just too much to handle from someone who was just an icon before.

I might be sounding cynical about internet relations, but there is a lot of truth hidden in this. It might not all be very logical, I mean nobody made a rule that two internet friends can’t gel well in person too. It happens sometimes, but such cases can be safely ignored as round-off errors. One more thing that people might argue is, there are friends who had to move away due to a job or studies, what stand do I take in such cases?

Well, whatever it is, the bottomline is, real friends are really really really hard to find. It takes a lifetime to find more than two-three, that too if you’re lucky. This explosion of social networks, flood of interaction, truck-load of friends – is very unnatural. Its not real, its all a world of illusion. Its in their best interests to keep the illusion going, so that people keep using these sites, and keep feeling that they’ve a 1000 friends, and still counting.

One of my favorite quotes would suffice the closing.

Its not a miracle to make a 100 friends, the real miracle is to make 1 friend that’ll be there when 100 are against you.