Friends are as close as a Web site away

Oakland Tribune, Jun 11, 2006 by Christine Morente, STAFF WRITER

Keeping in touch is not what it used to be.

Forget about exchanging phone numbers after high school, because most likely, you won't get a call. Long-winded e-mails are also a thing of the past.

Now, it's all about communicating over myspace.com, friendster.com, or facebook.com.

More so than in the past, keeping in touch with classmates after high school is easier for Internet-savvy teenagers. So, when graduates go to write "KIT" in each other's yearbooks this year, they can actually mean it.

It's why 18-year-old Ivan Maranan created an account with myspace.com, a social networking site.

"Well, my girlfriend made it for me," the Jefferson High School senior said. "I kept it because when I go to college, I wouldn't be able to talk to anybody I went to high school with (without it). I want to be able to keep in touch."

Twenty-one-year-old Katie Crumpton is an Aragon High School Class of 2003 graduate. The San Carlos resident still talks to her friends from high school because of myspace.com. The Web site has more than 40 million members.

"I had to give in to keep in touch with friends who are away or in college," Crumpton said. "I don't really have it to meet new people. It's just for friends I've already established."

It's easier for her to send her friends messages on myspace than calling them on the phone.

"They can respond when they want, and you can write them when you want," Crumpton said. "If you're 300 miles apart, you're not necessarily going to call someone up. It's also a good way to share pictures and stuff like that."

Crumpton's mother, Viki Patterson of Foster City, no longer keeps in touch with friends from high school.

"After many years of being out of high school, we've kind of lost contact," said Patterson, who graduated from Aragon in 1978.

They initially kept in touch the old-fashioned way: exchanged phone numbers, or depended on friends' parents for gossip.

"Now, I don't get that kind of information anymore," she said. "My dad was the Hedda Hopper of San Mateo. He could have written a column, he knew all the gossip." Patterson doesn't have a myspace or classmates.com account, because she said she finds it a little frightening.

Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information, or I-School, said there are public and private information issues.

"We're making more information available to people," he said. "All that information is searchable. I know a lot of folks use these (Web sites) to look up old friends and send them an e-mail. Before, reconnecting was virtually impossible. It used to be through word of mouth."

Crumpton, however, considers having a myspace account invaluable for keeping in touch. Her friendships have improved since high school.

"Myspace was not really a big thing yet when they moved away, and I didn't talk to them unless they were home," Crumpton said. "Now I have better contact, and I know when they're coming home."