Facebook friends - 'real' or not?

My first post was about Facebook and here I am, again, posting about Facebook. Referring to the title, I call it an obsession, as these days, even though my broadband speed has been reduced down to dial up (thank you Telecom!) I still have to check it every morning and then maybe several during the day; and this is even though I know that nothing much would have changed, or that I wouldn't have received any new posts.

What I don't get then is, why does this obsession exist or how it even came about in the first place?! Considering that social networking sites are quite a recent phenomenon, the extensive use of these sites is quite intriguing.

In terms of the use of social networking sites, especially Facebook something that is particularly striking is the whole concept of having friends whom one doesn't know in their otherwise daily life or hasn't ever met. But adding them on Facebook and developing a 'friendship' online is regarded as something real; something that would happen in the offline life. Personally I have never done this, simply because I've never looked at social networking sites from a perspective of a site where one might make new associations, I have always only added those people as friends who I know and I have met, basically have had some sort of association with in real life. However, a lot of people seem to use social networking sites for the purpose of making friends and this does intrigue me a lot.