Facebook not for close friendships: British researcher

0 Comments | AFP, September, 2007

LONDON (AFP) — Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace are unlikely to help users build close new friendships, a British researcher said Tuesday.

This is because people feel they need face-to-face contact in order to develop trust, said Doctor Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University in northern England.

"Although the number of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the number of close friends is approximately the same as in the face-to-face real world contact," he told the British Association Festival of Science in York, northern England.

He added that people see face-to-face contact as "absolutely imperative" in building close relationships and that it was "very easy to be deceptive" over the Internet.

In the early...