How do we really know????

Recently one of my online buddies was having some stress about another of our online buddies. She had not been able to get a hold of the other person for several days. This is someone who she had contact with every night. She tried and tried to get a hold of her. Emails, myspace, cell phone calls. She was even going to call the local hospitals to see if she was there, but unfortunately she did not know her last name. She finally was able to get a hold of her, after the friend was released from the hospital! She had been very sick. My friend wished she had known. She felt so bad that her friend was in the hospital and yet she had no idea. But that is one of the hard parts of having online friendships. Some of us can be very very private, for personal reasons. And that is perfectly acceptable. I know that I am going to be more careful. I have been too open and trusting in the past and it has come back to bite me in the butt. But when something like this happens, you wish you knew just that little bit more. Today on Yahoo News there is an article about a man who was big into an online game. He had quite a few friends in a group that he belonged too. The man passed away and his family had no idea how to contact his online friends. No one knew his passwords so they could not log into his game. Finally his daughter asked around that gaming community and found someone who recognized her fathers online game ID and they were able to direct her to his group. It took a while but she was able to find them. Some in the group thought that he had gotten mad and was taking a break. How could they have known that the man had died? I have worried about online friends before. Some just all of a sudden disappear. You wonder what happened? You worry. Then you start to wonder if they really had existed or if they were made up by someone who was hiding who they really were because you had already made it clear that you did not want to have anything to do with them. One example is someone started posting on a blog that I was going to. They came across super friendly and quite funny. They got a myspace, had everyone join it, and then they up and disappeared. Stopped going to the blog, stopped going to myspace. They have not even logged onto myspace for about 2 years now. What happened? Where did they go? I ended up deleting them because I didn't see the point in keeping someone as a myspace friend if they were not even going there anymore. Weird. Makes you wonder if that person is even alive anymore. So what do you do? I know I have some people programmed into my cell phone so if anything were to happen to me my family would be able to contact those people, and they in turn would let people know. I have addresses of a lot of other online friends. So I know I'm covered. But what about some of my other online friends? I would have no idea of how to find out what is going on if they stopped showing up at blogs, myspace or facebook. I would have no idea if they just got tired of it all and up and left. Or if they were sick. Or hurt. How far do you keep your distance with online friends? Are you not suppose to get that close to people you have never met face to face? I would find that really hard since I feel like I have become very close to some.
So what do you do? How do you protect yourself and yet meet people at the same time? I am generally a pretty nice person. And a very loyal friend. And yet I find being an online friend can be difficult. It is hard for me to trust now. I definitely have my group of online friends that I love and trust. Some I talk to all the time, others I talk to every once in a while, because life just gets in the way.
I would be extremely saddened to lose any of these friends. So don't any of you go anywhere!