Most of mine are face to face real people - some of those started out from blogs and IRC, in a kind of incubation stage. Some have been graduated from Twitter

Most of mine are face to face real people - some of those started out from blogs and IRC, in a kind of incubation stage. Some have been graduated from Twitter to a kind of incubation where I await meeting them in person before I afford them "write access to my brain". I find meeting people in person, one is able to really gauge people's personalities, passions, sense of humour, side interests and the like. And the side effect of meeting your heroes is that they appear to be just as human and fallible as yourself!