/Message: Anne Truitt Zelenka and Steve Rubel On Web Friendship

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In a world of flow, our sense of friends existence is deepened, since we have a dozen opportunities to acknowledge distant friends' comings and goings, to comment on their insights, and to take their temperature based on how loudly they are shouting on Twitter today. We commune in a virtual village marketplace, swapping stories with someone from Switzerland, getting advice from Hawaii, and replying to a partner in London. We can arrive in a distant city, and arrive at a dinner party -- a real one -- with colleagues and contacts hat we haven't seen in months, without missing a beat because of our online connection. The distinction between quality and quantity is missing something fundamental. While some may be accumulating contacts at Facebook like stamp collecting, and while others may be spending dozens of hours per week in chatrooms, it is not the gross metrics that matter, really. The nature of friendship itself, is shifting. It is no longer the byproduct of physical proximity, it is no longer strongly bounded by geography, and it is strongly mediated by our social tools. Texting, blogging, and trafficking (what we are doing in flow apps) have become essential to our continued connections with our friends, and we could no more keep up our relationships without these tools than we could put aside language itself.