For the past year and a half or more, I’ve lived most of my life within online communities, and having friends from these communities has become a part of my reality.

Some people have criticized my way of living and the social life I have, saying that friends online are not real friends. For a while, I believed them, because I was hurt by someone some people whom I met online. But now, I can really say this – that my friends whom I’ve met online are as real as the friends I meet through school or work.

I remember when I was a much younger girl, my parents used to warn me about the strangers I met online. They used to tell me that under no circumstances, I was to meet up with the people I made “friends” with online.

10 years have passed since I first got connected to the internet. 8 years have passed since I first met up with an online friend, at West Mall. His name was Payton. But I digress.

Today, my social life consists mainly of meeting friends from Plurk or Ping.sg for dinner after work, meeting up for coffee, going out with them for a movie or coffee, or desserts, or a meal over the weekend, joining them for Singapore Slingers basketball games at the Indoor Stadium, meeting them at PR-blogger events, having supper with them, or just basically, hanging out.

While some may say that my social life has deteriorated, I beg to differ. I have more than 30 friends whom I talk to on a regular basis (either on Plurk, Facebook, MSN, Gtalk, phone or SMS) and at least 15 whom I meet up with on an equally regular basis. And these people are people with whom I can have interesting and meaningful conversations with, be it about my life, about philosophy, about religion, about current affairs, about the ongoings in their lives, about food, movies or books, or any other interests. With the astounding number of people online, there’s always someone you can talk to about some quirky interest or other.

And I simply love starting threads and taking initiative to meet up with these friends, whether I’ve known them for years, or just a few days, because I enjoy being around people, meeting people and talking to them, listening to them share about their lives and perspectives on certain issues, as well as sharing mine.

What I love is the spontaneity of it all. I could just send out a message, asking, “Anyone wants to meet up for coffee and Scrabble?” and someone would reply. A similar message on any night asking for company over dinner would be responded to by at least one friend willing to meet up. Sometimes more than one person respond, turning what was meant to be a simple meet up into a huge gathering (remember the Plurk gathering at ICB back in November 08?)

Some may find this extremely unusual, but I suppose it’s a habit for me, to meet up with friends from online, and to organize gatherings and outings. It began from the time when I got myself involved in Ping.sg – slowly, I began to organize outings, and then I joined my friend Uzyn in helping him manage community events and activities.

By the time my stint at Ping.sg came to a close, I was already involved in another similar “community” on Plurk.com, which consisted of a lot of people from Ping.sg too. A lot of us were already familiar with one another, and we roped in friends of our own to join in the conversations on Plurk as well.

I don’t find these friendships wrong. Neither do I find them meaningless. Of course there have been mis-steps along the way – I’ve met less-than-nice people, but hey, they are everywhere – online, offline, even in your families! In fact, there are more horrible, poisonous people offline than online! But not all of the people online are creeps, you see?

I’m sure everyone will have a story to share, or will have heard a story, about an online friendship, an online romance that became a dream come true, or about learning from people online, etc. There’s a huge community (which translates into a huge pool of resources) online, and people just have to see that this community is there for some common purpose, to learn something and to share something.

With the ease with which we are able to get connected to the internet these days, it is also no wonder that we make friends with twice the ease, and triple the speed as the good old internetless days. It also means that we keep in touch with friends more often online, than offline. I personally have friends whom I don’t meet often, but whom I talk to regularly online. How do you draw the line between online and offline friends, then?

Truth is, I’m happy to meet people online, because I can judge from their writings before I decide if they would be worth my time to meet up with offline. In fact, I’d really be able to better connect with people who have lives online, too. I said this just 5 days ago, on Monday:

And I stand by what I’ve said. Because this part of my life is so important to me, I will never give it up for anyone. If he loves me, he will accept me for who I am and what I love doing – he will never restrict me in my social life, BUT most of all, I expect him to partake in it too.

Therefore the conclusion that I will most likely end up with someone who is equally as active as I am online, if not more. I just hope that people in my life can understand this, and stop criticizing me about it.

To my online friends: Cheers, to many many more years of friendship, and great conversations, and laughter-filled outings, and discovery of new interests. Cheers to learning, sharing, and helping one another in times of need. And most of all, cheers to US, because we are having the type of fun that some people only dream about!