Making friends in the real world can be hard. You need to overcome issues of trust, intimacy, vulnerability and, sometimes, conflicting loyalties. But the payoff matches the effort: a good friend is invaluable.

In the world of online social networks, the word "friend" is a lot less meaningful; it includes your most casual of virtual acquaintances. Until you have a chance to build a certain level of trust with them, respect and affection, your interaction with your online friends (a.k.a. "buddies" or "contacts", depending on which social network you're using) will often be the digital equivalent of nodding at each other as you pass in the hall.

The good news? It's much, much easier to make "friends" than to make friends. These folks will come in two flavours: people you already know from elsewhere, and people you've met through this particular social network. Here are some tips for adding people from both groups to your buddy list. We'll use Facebook as the example, but many of the tips here will work just as well on other services:

• Start with the obvious: Tools like address book importing and search will actually take you a long way. But you may be surprised at just how many of your friends aren't in your address book, or who signed up with different email addresses than the ones you have for them, or whose names don't jump to mind when you're searching. So you'll need to use some of these other strategies.
  
• Find friends from work and school: Once you've entered your work and education history in your profile, Facebook lets you browse people who also worked for your past employers, as well as people who graduated in the same year as you did.
  
  And don't limit yourself to that one year. Facebook also lets you choose other graduating years. Chances are you knew people who graduated a year or two before or after you.
• Look for birds of a feather: Scope out the groups that speak to your interests... especially niche interests. Browse the member lists for names you recognize.
• Use a friend to find a friend: Just as you'll often run into one friend talking with another in the real world, chances are good your online friends have already linked up with other folks you know. Flip through their friends lists and you're bound to run into somebody.
• Participate: Did you ever read those Ann Landers columns where someone would write in asking how they could meet people, and Ann would suggest that they get involved in their local church? The same thing works well in social networking sites. Start a group or join an existing one, and get active. Post on the wall. Comment on forum posts and people's notes. As you take part, you'll also get to know new people – and you'll soon be sending them friendship invitations, if you haven't received them yourself.
• Bag on the boilerplate: I know we're using Facebook as an example, but I can't resist adding a LinkedIn tip. When you invite someone to join your network, don't use the canned boilerplate text that LinkedIn gives you. Instead, write a personal invitation, something in your own voice that makes some reference to your relationship with the recipient. You'll start getting a lot more of your invitations accepted.

If your organization is listed in Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, congratulations. Quite apart from the virtues of collaborative editing, Wikipedia entries often rank at or near the top of Google search results.

Now break open your RSS aggregator. You're going to want to add a new subscription immediately... because nearly anybody could be editing your entry.

Here's what you do: navigate to your Wikipedia page. (Here's a shot from the entry about Wikipedia itself.)

Click on the "history" tab, and you'll be taken to a page detailing every change that anyone has made to this entry, with the most recent at the top.

In other words, it's in the same order as a blog... and like a blog, this page has a news feed. If you're using a modern browser, you'll see an indicator in your address bar (and you can use your browser to subscribe to the feed). If not, just scroll down to the Toolbox on the left-hand side of the page.

The third item in that list offers you your choice of an RSS feed and an Atom feed. Copy the link from whichever one you prefer, and paste it into the aggregator of your choice.

(My setup: I use Firefox 2.0, and I've configured it so that when I click on the XML feed icon in the browser's address bar, it prompts me to subscribe to the feed using Bloglines. I already have a Bloglines folder dedicated to media and blog monitoring, and in it goes.)

A few days ago, we received a terrific question from Jenny Edwards (ED of England's Homeless Link, a national organization of frontline agencies dealing with homelessness). She's intrigued by Second Life's potential, but...

Having joined SL mid December and spending much of the holiday season there I have been thinking about how useful and creative it would be to network those of us round the world who are working to end homelessness and to share ideas and experience. The dilemma for me in thinking of using it for work the amount of adult material and behaviour. It's fine for people privately but inviting others into the world, particularly those from faith based communities, is too problematic for me at the moment. Have you found a way of overcoming this?

It's an issue, all right - and not just for people in faith-based communities. Ask any enthusiast, employee or consultant who finally convinced a friend, parent, boss or client to check out Second Life... only to have them run into X-rated territory.

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I’ve spent the past two days at a Ohio State for a conference on Building Democracy Through Online Citizen Deliberation, which has been a terrifically productive gathering. One session consisted of an interesting conversation about how to structure online deliberation in a way that promotes civil dialogue. We agreed that one key challenge was simply keeping online conversation on topic, and got most of the way towards a list of 10 ways to keep online dialogue on topic.

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