Keeping in touch using the Internet
 

I'm not sure whether this thread belongs to Tilted Living or Tilted Computers... More like "Tilted Living through Computers" :D

Anyway, for some years now, me and my friends from high school have kept contact using different forms of online communication. Examples include a homebrewn "loose" forum (no moderators, a lot simpler than TFP) which was quite a hit for a couple of years and a "news portal" which turned out to be not-that-great, as we had burned out as a community long ago in the first forum.

Of course we have also kept in touch using emails. I was thinking of creating a mailing list some months ago, but mailing lists are so 90s and besides, many of my friends are not very internet-savvy. Somehow emails are not very practical.

Keeping touch is difficult when you're studying abroad, So here I am, trying to create an "online reunion" :-) not only of my direct friends but also of friends of friends etc. I have considered various options. Having seen the rise and downfall (for lack of a better word) :-) of 2 forums used by my friends, I am definitely dumping the idea of establishing yet another forum/news-based community.

Blogs: well yes, I have made a LiveJournal account, under which I've posted two "testing 1 2 3" entries to see the functionality. I don't find that very effective and I doubt other people will go into the trouble of maintaining a blog just so they can keep in touch with a bunch of people they know from high school. Plus, I think you have to pay to use interconnectivity of the blogs and create an online community. In any case, blogs are too troublesome.

"Social networking" websites: Yesterday I stumbled upon <a href="http://www.friendster.com">Friendster</a>. I then found links to Orkut, MySpace and other, more obscure online communities. My first impression is that the whole concept is very cool. However, I am not sure whether it's just an Internet fad, or whether it's actually usable. In some way, Friendster looks more "professional" than mySpace, which sometimes looks too much like an online dating service.

Is there anyone here who has tried out Friendster or any similar online communities? How effective is it (providing that the other members of the community care)? How do you keep touch in cyberspace with friends that live far away in meatspace? Any further pointers?

I found this question interesting and thought it deserved a bump...

i'm on friendster, myspace, and orkut. don't like orkut.

friendster is great, i've foiund a lot of old friends from as far back as elementary school. very professional looking, good site. and they've been adding content like chat forums (which i thought weren't implemented great, but at least they'r ethere), and instant messaging.

myspace is like friendster, but for, in general, a more alternative crowd (in my point of view). it's a great site as far as features go. if friendster could add all of the features and functionality of myspace, i think ti would be super duper! :) myspace is really more towards 'friend whoring' (getting as many 'friends' on your list as possible) than anything else i think.

but their all free... id' definatly recommend friendster and myspace, but if you really wnat to keep in touch with friends, use friendster.

I've been kind of wondering about this stuff as well. I've just pretty much been directly e-mailing people every month or so. We used to have a forum, but there kept being stupid bugs and the guy who was running it got tired of it and gave up. But whenever there's breaks or we find out other poeple are in town (We're mostly in college, I'm not, but that's a different story) we'll try to get a group together. Also, a lot of us, being in college, are on thefacebook.com, which is a friend network site for college kids.

The problem with Friendster, etc is that if people aren't going to email, are they going to do that? It requires the same amount of knowledge, pretty much, but at least it has social groups. I don't know if there's anything perfect for everything you need though.

My first thought would be just a simple forum. What made you stray from your forum? Forums are my favorite place to meet new people and converse with friends because they provide such a casual atmosphere. Anybody can say what they have to say and get replies about it.

http://invisionfree.com/ has great forum services. Completely free, takes about 3 minutes to set up a board and tweak your settings, and has no annoying banner ads or popups.

What about setting up a "team blog" over at www.blogger.com? That's how I communicate with my friends for a couple of months now.

That's what I was thinking too. A group blog is good (if you're already into the blog scene, anyway) because if there's no news it takes up no extra space in your RSS reader and no extra brain-cycles for any of the members.

i use facebook, ( www.facebook.com ) its great. but kind of limited to colleges and whatnot.

I forgot! I also use hi5 (www.hi5.com), which is also pretty neat.