Warning: you can't make real friends online

Investigations by researchers studying how the site changes the nature of friendship networks suggest that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace can not help you make more real close friends. Social networks on the Internet can help people gather hundreds or thousands of acquaintances, but researchers believe face-to-face contact almost always needs true intimate friendship.

"The number of friends at these sites may be high, but in real world the number of real close friends is nearly the same", says Will Reader, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield Hallam.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others have grown rapidly in recent years. Facebook was originally launched for members of Harvard University in 2004 but has since expanded to more than 34 million users worldwide. Founded in 2003, MySpace has over 200 million users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Group in 2005 for $ 580 million (£ 285 million).

In a previous survey, a traditional friendship group of a person consists of about 150 people, of which five are very close friends, but more people are in contact with us.

This number is very consistent and scientists believe that this will be determined by the recognition limit of catching up with a large number of people.

However, the reader and his team discovered that social networking sites allow people to extend this number.

The team asked more than 200 people to fill out a questionnaire about their online network. The team found that they could tie hundreds of acquaintances like these with traditional friendship networks, but people tend to have about five close friends.

90% of the contacts who think that the subject is a close friend are those who meet face to face.

"People believe face-to-face contact is an absolutely necessary condition for close friendship," Dr. Reader added. He told the York British Science Association that social networking sites make it possible for people to spread their list of acquaintances nodding as it is easy to keep in touch with them online. "What you can do with a social networking site is to reduce the cost of maintaining and building these social networks, as you can post information to multiple people," he said.

But the reader said that in order to build a true friendship, it is necessary to understand that the other party can trust. "What we need is to ensure that people truly invest in us and when we need them we will really be around us ... in the internet To be fooled is easy. "

Rather than making friends in real life, there are many reasons for online friends to look like people. First of all, online friends can easily make, online friends you can chat with just going to a website where people can become friends online. However, making friends in real life is not that simple. For example, when you first go to a new job or a new school, people are always afraid that they are judged by the random people they see each day. This makes this person hard to make friends. If your colleague has a terrible first impression on you, you may be excluded even from the group before you know each other. Therefore, it is difficult to find a person who says, "Work is fun and everyone is very friendly."

Today, the app allows you to provide the content you need when you need it - contains many online friends. But how to achieve a leap from a virtual partner to a friend in real life? We gathered some tips from friends who jumped onto the site from the Internet and built a strong and lasting relationship in the process. There are many reasons why your path crosses other people's online path. You may be participating in a business networking group, artist forum, or support group. Regardless of the situation, these common points can lead to quick connection. This is the case where Suzanne Zuppello of New Yorker and a woman in the UK began discussing breast cancer BRCA mutation in a private Facebook group. Eventually, they learned that they were of the same age and coped with a similar fight. "Since we shared this rare major preventive surgical experience, we think mutual trust is already felt," Zuppello said.