Email Friends and Pen Pals

It was back in 1998 that I started to work on Emailfriends.com. I was always interested in meeting new and exciting people from around the world. I figured what a great medium to use to spread the word about making friends on the internet. Now I’ll give you some fun history of email friends and pen pal making from my past.

I spent my school years in the 1980’s…before the internet was publically available and. I was fascinated by countries around the world. In particular, Germany, Sweden and Finland. I have no idea why, but I thought they seemed like some pretty cool places. My German lanuage teacher told us that there were opportunities to talk to other people around the world and make friends with by means of a pen pal service. Eventually we would all have our own pen pal from another country that we could write letters to and send small bits of currency from our country. Of course we would send friendly photos of eachother as well. Of course this was fun and exciting, but man, sometimes it would take a month to get a letter from Finland.

Around 1990 I started goofing around with e-mail and chat rooms on the internet. Still…no web browser was to be found. However the telnet chat rooms opened up the door to making friends in Soviet Republics and other countries that were usually unreachable by the western world. I was soon chatting with friends in Estonia…YES! Estonia… go figure such a small country could be so technically inclined. I used to hang out on a a bbs at the Tallin University. I totally forget the name now, but I made alot of friends there. I think the machine name was Marvin. If any of my old friends were there, especially Veiko Maandi (VMX) please post a comment and say hello.

Now, with the advent of web pages, mySpace and email friends.com of course, there are soo many new opportunities to meet new and exciting people. But, with this new convenience comes danger. Always act with caution and stay safe. It is fun to make friends on the web, but you have to be careful.

If you have any old email friends or old internet stories you would like to share, please post them in a comment.