It’s easy to make friends on the Internet, especially through social networking. When, through coincidence, those Internet friends turn into real-life friends because of proximity, great things can happen.

Thus starts the story of “When Louie met 0boy.”

We first noticed each other on Digg. He was an up and coming power user and I was an active old-schooler. We met through the IMs proudly posted on each of our accounts and started chatting about Digg. Following an afternoon of Irish Shepherd’s Pie at a local Orange County pub, we were officially “real life friends.”

It didn’t take long before we started crossing paths more often on other social media sites. We exchanged ideas, strategies, helped each other with stories, and even started planning a social media meetup in Los Angeles so we could go cut through the veil of social media nicknames and avatars and see the real people behind them. [Read more...]