How to Stay Connected to Friends

Staying in touch with friends on the Internet has never been easier! You can email, instant message, blog, voice chat, video chat, tweet or vlog. Even if you’re new to the World Wide Web or simply looking for another method of digital communication, you have plenty of options to choose from.

Email is a simple and clean way to send digital letters to all of your friends. You usually log on to your email server’s homepage to check your email, but there are programs to get faster access and added security. Email programs allow you to easily and quickly check your email because they save your log in information and log you in automatically.

Outlook Express: Microsoft's built in email management program. It gives you all the basics of security and email HTML editing. It comes with Internet Explorer and later versions of Windows such as Vista.

Thunderbird: Thunderbird not only adds a wall of protection around your email, it has a built in junk-mail filter that people rave about. It also protects you from phishing websites and messages that try to gather your personal information.

Instant Messaging programs are great. You can chat back and forth with friends and contacts in a live chat. It's faster than email, but requires that your friends be online and in your contacts list. Most IM programs come with a large collection of smiley face icons but the newer versions have built in voice and video chat features so you aren't limited to just a smiley to express yourself.

Yahoo Instant Messenger: One of the classier IM programs, it’s been around this long for a good reason; it's very clean and user-friendly. It has a great contact list and while you chat, you can challenge a friend to play games.

Pidgin: Pidgin is more versatile than other chat programs because it can combine your contacts from a lot of other IM programs into one. If one friend uses Yahoo while the other is stubborn and uses AOL – you can still chat with them both at the same time in Pidgin! Its cross-program chat features are some of the best.

Blogging is like owning your own news website because you can post whatever you like -- from pictures to plain old text. Blogs can be about whatever topic you want too! You can make a blog about your dog, your favorite recipes, cars or anything else you can think of. You're reading this on a blog right now. Vlogging is just like blogging only in video form! A lot of vloggers use YouTube to host their videos, which they then link to on their blog site. It's a great way to explain your feelings or show someone how to do something that might be hard to explain in writing.

The most popular and largest communication method on the net aside from blogs is the world of social networking websites. Massive monsters like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others allow you to track thousands of contacts, friends and family in one place, play games and find people you forgot you knew. Each has its own learning curve, but they are all worth it!

About the Author : This is a Guest Post from Amy Silver,a Public Health student who loves her dogs and finding a good deal. She's recently started blogging and you can find her at twitter.com/amyjsilver.

Mental Benefits of Socializing and Dating

Un-social Networking
Kindly tallied and conveniently displayed on your Facebook Profile page, the latest numbers indicate that you have over 300 friends. Their smiling faces stare back at you from tiny boxes that greet you each time you log on. How do you feel knowing you have so many friends? With social networking and instant messaging, most of the socializing people do happens via the computer screen. Although convenient, cyber socializing has ramifications that extend beyond your naked calendar and, to be precise, into your brain. For the sake of your mental health, you need more physical face time with friends and love interests.

Social Brains
The brain is a complex command center engineered with highly sophisticated synaptic cogs, axons, and firing neurons. As competent as the brain is, it isn’t immune to the stimulus introduced to it. Certain drugs can actually change brain chemistry, while activities like a daily Sudoku puzzle can improve brain functioning and memory. What then would happen to your brain if you were to forgo Facebook and introduce it to another person, face to face? Quite a lot, actually.

Friends with (Mental Health) Benefits
Consider a recent study conducted by the University of Michigan. When participants spoke to individuals they had not met before in a conversational manner, their ability to solve problems and perform cognitive tasks improved. This is just another reason to go on more first dates. It turns out social savvy and smarts go hand in hand. By swapping thoughts, ideas, or basic stats with people you come in contact with, your brain’s executive functioning—that all-important part that controls planning and thinking—gets a boost. However, when competitive conversations occurred between participants in the same study, there was no improvement in cognitive performance. Translation, don’t date jerks who just want to argue. You may not become Mensa material by socializing, but a good chin-wag can get those cogs going.

Talk to a Friend
The human ability to express thoughts, ideas, emotions, and wishes with others is so basic it’s easy to miss how essential it is for good mental health, and not just cognition. A study conducted among medical students showed that those who were assigned to study in pairs had markedly lower levels of stress than those assigned to work alone. A number of clinical studies performed over the last several years also proved that people with a network of friends they could actually speak to were more resilient. They coped better with illness, impairments, and life stresses than individuals without a support network.

I'll Have My Brain Call Your Brain
Considering how beneficial regular conversation is for mental health, you may want to think twice about two hours of Twitter browsing. If you need some ideas for socializing, try one of the following:

Host a work party
Have a neighborhood potluck
Start a book club meeting
Attend a dance class
Go on more dates
Go to an exhibit opening

These are all great ways to socialize, give your brain some beneficial stimuli, and stave off loneliness. You could even invite your 300 friends. While it might feel good to turn on the computer and see what's going on in the virtual social world, you'll get many benefits from scheduling activities with friends or planning events to meet new people and date.

About the Author : This is a Guest Post from Julee Russo, a dog lover who focuses on living life and savoring every moment without messing up the next.

Dedicated to the One That Got Away

Guest Post by Danny

This article is dedicated to the one that got away, and I think you already know who I am talking about. Practically every person has a “one that got away”, that is, an ex-lover or perhaps a would-be lover that never quite materialized.  Maybe you met this person online or knew him or her in person. The problem was that the two of you were mistimed.

It wasn’t necessarily a mismatch, because you could tell there was some compatibility there.  However, because one or both of you were at different places in life, perhaps holding on to different perspectives, or very challenging circumstances, a romantic match just wasn’t possible.

Usually, mistimed matches result because of one of these factors:   

One or both of you was dating someone else     
One or both of you didn’t quite understand the right way to flirt     
There were personal or secular distractions     
Your values (what you wanted in a mate) were different back then     
One factor (perhaps insignificant now) kept you apart     
Dramatic or traumatic circumstances broke you up     
One of you moved away

Despite our best attempts to remove a person from our memory (which Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind proved was possible) we will occasionally think back to a lost romance and wonder—if things were different—if it would have worked out. The answer is neither as happy nor as fatalistic as you would have it.

So…Would it Have Worked Out?

There’s no sense in concluding that because the relationship didn’t work out that you were not destined to be together.  Who knows?  Perhaps the two of you would have been compatible.  By the same logic, the two of you could have worked things out to a point, only to discover that you had other major problems to work through.

Therefore, it’s not practical to daydream of what could have been.  Like any other relationship you’ve had, it’s very possible that this idealized match could have heated up and then fizzled out because of irreconcilable differences or tragic circumstances.

What matters is the person that you are now.  We must all live in the present and accept that the past version of “us” is just a memory.  Some people may find the very idea of tracking down an “old crush” very intimidating and rightfully so.  In reality, you are not meeting the old, idealized person you once remember…you are meeting the person he or she has turned into, someone that could be very different from your memory and imagination.

That’s not to suggest that it’s a mistake to do a little research.  Social media sites like Face Book and MySpace make it very easy to track down old high school loves, exes, crushes and cute acquaintances.

Anti-Climactic Meetings?

However, don’t be too crushed if your crush is less than welcoming—especially if you cyber-stalk this person by name and suddenly re-appear in his/her life.  Some people dislike faces from the past, whereas others may not even remember you.  If though you find another old softie like you, then enjoy the day of reminiscing.

Otherwise, it’s best to focus on the person you are today and the type of match you want to meet right now.  If you love the idea of a forgotten lover (or crush) then instead of daydreaming about a reunion that will never happen, think about the qualities and traits that the old forgotten crush had that made you feel happy.  These are the qualities you should be looking for today in someone that does match you in the present.

This common sense approach to dating will spare you lots of wistful heart-aching.  Love who you are now and the journey you have taken. Let someone in without pretenses! 

About the Author : This is a Guest Post by Danny who works for a dating start up called  top 10 dating websites and provides Dating Comparison.