Online friends
 

Let's share our experience with online friends!
How was your experience? Do you think you can be good friends in real life? What are your thoughts about online friends?

I'll post up mine a bit later ^^

I hella like internet friends! I'm not sure if any of u guys are cool enough for me to actually hang out with irl tho. Except for cub, he seems cool.

Almost all of the people I routinely email/SMS/chat with online are people I've known for years, and I don't consider them "online friends" since the vast majority of them I met in person first.

A few I met through message boards or online gaming, and met in person later on.

You aren't cool enough to hang out with me. :heh:

Most of my RL friends, I met them online initially or through their contacts. Practically all of them are weird or slightly nutty, but at least they are a whole lot more honest than the people I meet in school (how can one be "economical with the truth" when it is priceless?).

Online friends? You mean there's actually any other kind of friend?

I kid... actually, most of my online friends I've never met in RL, and most of my RL friends I don't chat with online. I've only ever met one person from online in RL, and that was because of a dating website, and things sadly never developed...

They aren't "online" friends if you met them in person first :D

Are you annoyed if one or two of your online friends *intentionally* ignore you on chat? I have an online friend who ignored me or intentionally waited 30 minutes to respond to me, and I happened to know that she wasn't busy at all.

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...jpF11IVFWL&t=1

Same sentiments too Gin, you seem like a fun guy to hang around with.

The rest of you might be crushed by my sheer awesome though so I recommend taking awesome pills so you don't die; this isn't arrogance, I genuinely care about your safety :p

Internet friends are good, wouldn't replace them with my real friends though, sometimes I do wish my friends had a mute button though xP

I ignore people on AIM, SMS or gtalk constantly, even when not busy, or when only partially distracted. I don't tell them when I get up to go to the bathroom or go for a smoke, nor do I say "brb" when I'm going to be gone for a minute.

Half the time I don't even say goodbye when I leave, lmao.

It drives some of my friends up the wall.

Its not my "job" to respond instantly online.... that's half the point of 'online', it gives you the luxury and control of your time that face-to-face doesn't.

Indeed.

My girlfriend annoys me sometimes whenever she sends me an sms and I don't immediately respond. She'll send me a flurry of question marks and I'm still trying to type out my first response. -.-'

I complained about it but she says she does it because sometimes I don't hear my sms notification... which is true... :uhoh:

The only online friends that I have are on my PS3 network. They are pretty cool for the most part hehe.:D

The sweet part about meeting people online, is that you get meet people from all over the world! Even though you live on a completely separate part of the world you still have the same interest, and you learn something new. I think thats something special :)

I would love to have some of you guys as neighborhood friends rather than the people that live near me now. We can be one big happy family :D

My wife used to do something like that with cell calls and text msging... I finally got it across that these things are true:
1) "delivery is not guaranteed"
2) "TIME of delivery is not guaranteed"
3) "I am not standing offstage idling and waiting for my cue in her universe"

Unless of course, she WANTS me to drive off the bridge answering her immediately... or listen to me in the 'loo making demonic sounds... or insult the person or client I'm talking to (hint: I do not take calls, answer email or texts while interacting with someone face-to-face -- that is utterly rude).

back on topic: As for friends I've met online first - mixed results. Sometimes I've been very disappointed when an articulate 'penpal' turns out to be pretty awkward or hard to interact with in real life. Other times its been just fine. I've 'skyped' with a couple of AS correspondents, I've met a handful in real life - one even rented a room from me for a few months while she got her feet anchored in my city.

The other thing to watch out for is that you might share interests in ONE hobby... but discover you are poles apart on everything else.

agree on truth being priceless. although i'm not sure that there is actual correlation between honesty and online friends. i do have a theory that all the weird ppl in the world are honest...

on topic

i'm not such a big fan of online conversations. forums i visit on and off, ppl won't even remember me when i come back.
but i did make friends with one person online. it was a girls i traded anime with in Moscow. so we traded once, naturally having each others' ICQ we chatted about our next trade and somehow it turned to other topics. we later went to an anime party together. we hung out, drank together. she even smoked weed with me and i didn't pay for it.
but then it all fell apart for reasons i can't see. maybe we got tired of each other or smth.
but except that example, i prefer to make friends IRL. there was a time when ppl kept bugging me on ICQ wanting to just talk. like, random ppl that liked my profile. if they weren't in my city, i deleted them automatically. because i couldn't meet them hypothetically.

About online chat:
I never say goodbye when I log off and all of my friends know that :D But I respond immediately EVERY time someone sends me a message. Even if I'm busy, I respond first, then let them know. It's understandable if you can't respond instantly. But intentionally making people wait for 30 minutes (?) even when you're not busy (?) is just rude because it shows that (1) you don't respect them and their time and (2) you may have an inflated ego by thinking you're "important" enough to be waited for. I don't know why anyone would do that.

About online friends:
I can say that I've got pretty good pictures of people's personalities when they chat with me. There're friends whom I've known for years, then we met in real life. But after the first meeting with an online friend, I figured that there still were some aspects of her personality that I didn't expect, such as, extreme shyness and pet peeves.. lol... and some others...

I've got a couple online friends, I made them all when I was younger. Some of them I just talk to on IM, and I met one of them this past summer; took a road trip to Minnesota to meet him.

Some of the people I've had a nice virtual relationship with give off the impression they wouldn't gel as well with me in the real world. Which is fine with me.

The only friends I call are the one who are willing to bail your ass out of jail at 3am as for online idiots there just some one to talk to that share the same interest. But I kill all that off and now I have no online friends

Both of us just updated our phones to CyanogenMod 7 RC1 and the default sms notification sound is fairly quiet.

We both forgot to change it today.

We both ended up missing a load of text messages from each other.

:heh: