>Making new acquaintances is useless if nobody from your 30km radius is on the network or if it is hard to meet people inside this radius. Friendships decay rea

>Making new acquaintances is useless if nobody from your 30km radius is on the network or if it is hard to meet people inside this radius. Friendships decay really fast with distance, especially when there is no real strong bond. I disagree, local proximity is not critical to maintaining a friendship. I have friends I talk with daily who live much further than 30km away, even some in other countries. A great thing about the internet is it allows people to connect over other similarities than physical location. I have some friends who I've never even met in person before, for example. On the other hand, I've never really found facebook style physical "friend-of-a-friend" type connections to be that useful to me. Most all of my friends in meatspace are part of the same group, ie all our "friend-of-friends" are each other. The rest are people who aren't interested in introducing me to the rest of their social circle. Now I don't think this proves anything, or even if there is any way of measuring the ease/quality of friends made on vs off line, but it's just an example from my own life. How well making friends with strangers online, strangers offline, or friends-of-friends depends heavily on your personality and current social group. The situation is a lot more variable than how you present it.