Will you make friendship with me, babes?

StudMaccha_123: Hey u, ya dnt no wht u r mssng. Make friendship with moi babes, i will make ur life. i rox. reply.

DesiArnold_hothunk: will you please accept my friend request? i really want to be your friend, plz plz plz.

I of course had to be flattered that the StudMaccha himself (who cares if he is 123rd in the list of StudMacchas) had expressed interest in being my friend. Or for that matter the very polite Desi Arnold , who was thoughtful enough to clarify that he indeed is a hot hunk - for those who might not know Arnold, maybe - wants to be my friend.

I think all of us on Orkut/Facebook/any of the million other social networking sites get these messages regularly.
While they boost my ego like nothing else, I end up having a laugh and deleting them eventually.
I know the only reason I get these messages is because my profile shows me as 'single, 25'. But even in real life I am a single female around 25, why don't the StudMacchas and Desi Arnolds come talk to me?
Oh, they can see me in real life and more importantly I can see them! That's why.
(And I don't have any photos or details for "5 turn ons, turn offs?" type questions on these sites! Yes, I recognise the generation gap here and realise that I belong to Gen X - are we onto Gen Z now? After that will we start with Gen AA? - which thought there was some fun in personal interaction and going out to dinners with real people, not online profiles.)

Why does anonymity make people do things they wouldn't dream of doing otherwise?
Why is it so lucrative to hide behind an online persona and profess your love to someone, approach someone and say you want to be their friend, sound cool by doing whatever you think sounds cool?
Maybe it’s the absence of consequences.
You are whatever you want to be online, you are what you project.
You can be this tall handsome lawyer who loves reading Nietzsche when you really are a portly, not so tall 17 year old kid who hates college and whose existential questions usually revolve around, "Why, o why, do I have new pimples every day?"

Here I have to confess that I am not a very big fan of these networking sites.
I see their utility in getting together people who have lost contact over the years or are geographically separated or bring together people having the same taste.
They are convenient too - you can wish an acquaintance on their birthday without actually calling them up, query ex-colleagues with whom you don't have too much to talk about etc.
They are nice, I feel, as long as your lives don't revolve around them.

But other than that, don't we already have enough ways to keep in touch with people we routinely interact with?
Is anyone more a SMS or a phone call away these days?
Why does the world have to know your half hourly schedules via one line messages on Twitter?
Didn't we always know how to reach our best friends before the Internet happened?

But I mostly put down my misgivings saying maybe I don't either have 20 non-overlapping circles of friends or a life that warrants bi-hourly status updates.
Maybe it's just me.