At last, after a great deal of badgering from various people including me, Multiply have separated out the Online Buddy contact category, so that we can use it safely. See here for more info about how this works (and ignore the "coming soon" - it's already here).
I'm so pleased they've done this. In the past there were people who invited me to sign up as their contacts and I had to turn them down because of privacy issues. Now I've been able to go into my profile and account settings and make sure that my email address is not visible to online buddies, and for each of my posts I can choose if I want it to be available to all contacts or to contacts excluding online buddies - the only faff was going through old posts and editing them where necessary. These new settings mean I'm free to sign up as an online buddy someone that I'm getting to know online, not just people that I already do know.
I feel it's a bit like when there was this nice lady I used to bump into on the bus, and we'd sit and chat, happily getting to know each other, in a safe context - we didn't exchange phone numbers, we didn't invite each other home for a cup of tea, though of course with time we might have felt like moving it on. I feel the new online buddy feature allows us to do that kind of thing here on Multiply.
One technical point if you choose to use this feature: when posting to Network, you will see there are three boxes under Network (friends;family;professional contacts) - if you leave all three boxes ticked, then online buddies can read your post; if you tick only one or two of the three boxes, then they can't.
