This is in response to Oz's post about email diaries. I had a similar experience at one point a few years ago, except mine occured on IM. I have a friend who I was intially introduced to by a mutual friend in real life, but who I first got to know well on IM. We were both working boring summer jobs far away from our normal circles of friends, so we ended up talking online a lot, sometimes for hours every day. When we got back to school, we started to see eachother in real life more, but we kept up with the incessant IM conversations for a long time.