Real friends and virtual strangers

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Been poked by anyone recently? Or maybe you've been turned into a zombie, or perhaps you've added Scrabulous to your applications?

For the uninitiated these questions will be greeted with a furrowed brow and a good deal of head scratching. But for Facebook users -- whose number have swollen to an incredible 35 million in a matter of months -- such summons are a familiar part of everyday life and are quickly weaving themselves into the vernacular of a tech-smart generation.

Most people who use social networking web sites -- other popular sites include MySpace, Friendster and Bebo -- do so as a way of keeping up with friends and family in a forum which is entertaining, informative and easy to use.

But for others they are treated as some sort of online popularity contest with people striving to attain as many "friends" as possible -- some users appear to have hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends.

But new research suggests that anyone looking to form new and genuinely close friendships via online social networks is going to be disappointed.

An ongoing UK study, conducted by Dr. Will Reader of Sheffield Hallam University, suggests that real life meetings are still needed to foster genuine "real" relationships which are based on trust.

Research by Dr. Reader, who has been studying over 200 networking site users, shows that they still have only around five close friends, and that these are almost always forged through face-to-face meetings.

He told the British Association Festival of Science held in York this week that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances simply because keeping in touch with people online is easy.

"What social network sites can do," Reader said, "is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people."

"But to develop a real friendship," he said, "we need to see that the other person is trustworthy. We need to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us and is really going to be there for us when we need them."

"People see face-to-face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships."

Dr. Reader discovered that although some people had made acquaintances with hundreds of people, their tally of close online friends mirrored that of real world friendships, with people tending to have around five close friends.

Ninety per cent of the study participants' close friends were people they had met face-to-face. The remaining 10 per cent were likely to be friends of close friends, who were regarded as having many of the mutual friend's attributes and therefore "low risk".

"What we need," explained Dr. Reader, "is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to be there for us. It's very easy to be deceptive on the Internet. What we need are cues that are indicative of investment."

Previous research by Professor Robin Dunbar at the Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Ecology Research Group at Liverpool University has shown that in the real world, the average person has a friendship circle of around 150 individuals -- who Dunbar describes as "people who you could ask a favor and expect it to be granted" -- and 12 people would form a more intimate clique.

It is too early to tell whether these nascent social networking sites will have a long term impact on the size and structure of real life social networks, but researchers will be keeping a close eye on them and charting their evolution for years to come.

Online activity denting workforce productivity

The increasing popularity of networking sites -- more than 100,000 Facebook registrations have been received every day since January 2007 -- is having an impact on British businesses. Increased online activity on networking sites appears to be diminishing workforce productivity.

According to a new report by the UK Employment law firm Peninsula, employees are costing companies over $260 million a day.

Based on responses from 3,500 companies, Peninsula estimate that 233 million hours are lost every month by employees "wasting time" on the Internet.

Mike Huss, director of employment law at Peninsula said: "The figures that we have calculated are minimums and it's a problem that I foresee will escalate. Loss of productivity through social networks such as Facebook is proving to be a major headache and my advice would be for companies to block access."

He added: "Continued misuse of the Internet by an employee is a situation when disciplining and sacking a worker is acceptable. Sites such as Facebook will only get more popular as time goes by and so I anticipate productivity will suffer as a consequence." E-mail to a friend