Online ‘Friends’, or should we say iFriends?

Have you noticed that with the explosion of social networks, Facebook, MySpace etc. that the word ‘friend’ seems to be some what devalued. Now days, via social networks, you can have a lot of so called friends whom you’ve never met. You only know them through the social network site, Instant Messages, email, SMS etc.

Perhaps we should coin a different word for these kinds of friends. as everything seems to be prefixed either with an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ when it comes to Internet related products and applications how about ‘iFriends’?

Now, up front I’d have to point out that the ‘ifriends’ is already in use to some extent. A Google search provided a total of almost 600,00 hits, with the top entries being for an adult web site. Now I haven’t checked them all out but the top hits don’t show it being used as a descriptor for Internet friends, which is what I’m suggesting it be used for.

I even checked Wikipedia and the only hits on it where with respect to the adult social network iFriends.

So lets see if we can get the word iFriends adopted for use where it refers to people you’ve met and ‘friended’ online but with whom may or may not have met in person.