Ask HN: Do you email your best friends?

Basically, if you can't do email, you can't be my best friend. But, then, my best friends tend to be met online and tend to live far away. My life isn't remotely "normal".

I do not email any friends. I am in my twenties. Before Facebook it was another social network, before that it was IM.

EDIT: I do chat to friends on Gmails chat.

There are three forms of communication (typically): verbal, written, and gestural. Verbal is either face to face - and often is heavily laced with gestural - or via telephone. And of course written in all its wondrous forms. Also the most "difficult" of the three. (Pardon... if I seem to be generalizing...) If you think about it, social networking is like a "holiday note" stuck in the card... sent to everyone on the list - but continually. You could do the same with email and then you would retain some ownership of your content. And Twitter is everyone's text messages - which would be spam if you got in your inbox. But it certainly is entertaining for some reason. I tried using Twitter as an RSS feed... eh! Actually, everyone has an email that uses a "social network"... so why not just use email? Email is peer-to-peer ... and creative developers could easily come up with a Facebook like email GUI. So you parse all your friends emails into a nice timeline and profile page... and when you update, you would send out a "group" email to your network - or select subset... and they would get it parsed out in their GUI. That's really all FB is... or Linkedin. What's the first thing they want to do when you sign up? Get your email contact list! So in essence, we give them our contacts and content so they can tell us what we can and cannot do with it (TOS) and then inundate us with more spam. What am I missing here?