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 1990s, scientists at Liverpool University in northwest England conducted research which suggested that most people have around 150 friends and acquaintances, but only five close friends.
Reader said that this figure also holds true for users of social networking sites.
Facebook, which was set up by a group of Harvard University students in 2004, has over 30 million users worldwide, compared to 200 million subscribers to MySpace, which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp.
The sites allow users to post pictures and information about themselves as well as send messages to others and build up lists of friends.
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