Clearly not. The groups that are formed through any social network take advantage of any opportunity for physical contact, to meet up and say that they are “friends.” More and more every day you receive all types of invitations to attend events in person that allow friendship and personal interaction.
Are there people who use them to avoid physical contact? Logically, with more than 500 million users on all kinds of social networks, you’ll find a little of everything. However, in my experience, those who have more people around them in a social network are precisely the people who relate better to others and have hundreds of old contacts, from long before these online networks existed.
Lars Hinricks, creator and CEO of XING, and its largest shareholder, Bill Liao, met while standing in line at the counter of an airline company that was going to take them to Cannes. They talked about the project and realized immediately that they were kindred spirits. Both had hundreds of contacts throughout world and they decided to create XING “searching for the larshindrichs’ and the billliaos of the world who were the center of their social business networks. Their success has come from betting on movers and shakers and, of course, not on those who are searching for isolation online.
Like them, all social networks search out and favor those who have and maintain many relationships and they, ultimately, generate a lot of traditional, physical networks.
The tool only serves to widen their sphere and improve their capacity to contact…
Translated by Babelic.com
