Real friends? Or just "friends"?

FYI:

I have been OL (means:Online. And yes, that abbreviation exists!) for an hour already and I still have an hour to kill before I have a discussion with my groupmates for our assignment.

Cool!
(1 hour more of surfing I mean. Not the assignment.)

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So apart from checking my mails and reading blogs and comments, I have been on Fstr giving out a massive dose of testimonials to my (lucky) friends - Lucky cos I can't exactly give testimonials to everyone on my list in under an hour.

Which leads me to the issue of Friends.

Sites like Friends.ter, My.Space and what-not have apparently become the "new way" of "making friends" nowdays...
Everything is literally at the tip of our fingers!

We can easily "add", "edit" and "delete" our "friends" on these sites.
But if we were to "delete" a "friend" from our "list", I guess that "friend" wasn't exactly a "friend" in the first place right? I mean, why would a person "delete" a "friend" if that person really was a "friend"?

Sometimes I question the motives of certain individuals who simply "add" friends but never take the effort to actually get to know that person. They don't know anything about them and they never try. No messages. No "smiles". No nothing. I guess all that's important to them is the number of friends they have on their list...

What's the point of having 200 friends on your list if you only actually know just 2 of them?

I have 180 friends on my list and I dare say I know all of them - we've met, we've talked, we've exchanged messages. Otherwise, I see no point in having them on my list in the first place.

That is why I NEVER add people I do not know or allow them to add me.

Sites like these are meant to help people make friends and keep in touch with old friends.

It is not (or at least I don't think it was) meant to "dilute" friendship into nothing but the number of people on your list.

Friendship has been commercialised since who-knows-when...(think "Friendship Day")...and now these "friendship" sites are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Its just so sad that what used to be "real" friendship-a quality, has now is now Friendship-the Commercial Product.

Don't get me wrong. I like Friends.ter.

A LOT!

It has helped me "reconnect" with long lost buddies and make new ones.
Almost everyone is on Friends.ter and that's not an overstatement.

It just saddens me that some people "abuse" such sites just to satisfy their egomanical self-satisfiying "collection" of "friends".

Some "friends", huh?

Well, I don't keep my friends just on a list.
Mine are also kept in the heart. =)