Online Communities – the art of making friends online

Yes, the Web, and to be more specific, Web 2.0 , is a burden for my self-confidence. Since the good old days of my first mobile cell-phone I have to face the fact that I have only a few friends in the real world; attempts to keep my phone number secret were completely superfluous, since no-one bothered to call me at all!. And, why denying what anyone knows, they were right. I’m only interested in books, computers and information, not the guy you are looking for if you want to talk smalltalk.

Then Instant Messaging came. I’ve collected them all; ICQ (1 friend), Yahoo (2 friends), Google talk (2 friends), AOL IM (2 friends) and, MSN-messenger with the incredible amount of 7 friends – okay, five of them are my own kids. 🙂

I forgot Twitter (no friends) and Skype (3 friends).

Now there is the Web 2.0 and online communities – I grabbed this funny map from this website:

Now I desperately realize how very unpopular I am 🙂

With more profiles than I can handle, I have organized them at Profile Linker. And I installed Flock – the social web browser. But still: no friends. Please don’t look at my profiles at Facebook, Hi5, Bebo, Friendster, GoodReads, LiveJournal etc. You’ll see no friends …err… one at Hi5.

MySpace, the ugliest community in the Virtual World has given me some friends (6), but I don’t think any of them knows who I am: most of them are musicians or bands who want to plug their stuff. And I feel not very proud of being a member of the MySpace community at all.

Okay, some communities are not in the Profile Linker-network: like Virb and Trig (very beautiful, especially Trig) and Ning, that also hosts the transhumanists.org network. This is more a high-quality community, that connected me to…11 friends – as much friends as with Hyves, (but, the same as with MSN, here my 5 daughters (and some of their friends) saved my ass), so Ning gives me that wonderful feeling of being an identity, a name on someone’s contact list, an avatar, a profile. I have a profile, therefore I am. Since there are also other networks at Ning, (I subscribed to Books, Composer’s and Second Life) I can boast on 41 friends at Ning. That’s a start…

The newest star at the web 2.0-firmament is Pownce. Still in Beta, so invitation-only. I have twelve invitations to give away, so if you want to try Pownce and need an invitation: send me an e-mail at kuehlebornatyahoo.com. Of course you’ll have to accept me as a friend, which, of course, is probably not an honor, but, be honest, it is nothing to be ashamed of either.