Technically Incorrect

All the lonely people.

The echo that is so often heard late at night across social networks.

In the latest case, a 16-year-old girl in Maryland learned that one of her Facebook friends, a boy in Oxford, England, was in distress. Late on Wednesday night, he wrote: "I'm going away to do something I've been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out."

The girl didn't know the boy's address. But she immediately felt this was a serious situation and told her parents.

They contacted the British Embassy, who in turn got in touch with Scotland Yard and the local police in Oxford.

All they had was a name. But they worked quickly to narrow the possibilities down to eight addresses.

(Credit: CC Jay Cameron/Flickr)

They sent police to each of these addresses, and within three hours of the Facebook message being written, the boy was found.

He had taken a drug overdose, but was alive.

This story follows the one earlier this year when a MySpace member in New Jersey helped a distressed teenager in Sacramento, Calif. And it comes in the same week that actress Demi Moore and her followers helped a woman in the San Jose, Calif., area after she had used Twitter to announce her suicidal intentions.

Sometimes you don't know who your real friends are.

Twitter is frivolous. Witness Ashton Kutcher, who tweeted a photo of his wife's bottom just the other day.

However, that wife, Demi Moore, shifted her bottom Friday when perhaps another star might have turned the other cheek, in an act that showed Twitter has its serious uses too.

On her own Twitter feed, Ms. Moore received a message from sandieguy, an apparently unemployed woman from the Silicon Valley area: "Getting a knife, a big one that is sharp. Going to cut my arm down the whole arm so it doesn't waste time."

As if this wasn't disturbing enough, she received another message just seconds later: "gbye ... gonna kill myself now."

One suspects that many stars might have ignored these messages as just the ramblings of the sad. Instead, Ms. Moore reposted the message onto her Twitter page and wrote: "hope you are joking."

It was then that some of her 388,000 followers sprung into action. They kept calling the San Jose, Calif., police to explain the situation. The police then located the woman and took her into custody for "evaluation."

(Credit: CC Cliff 1066/Flicker)

Ms. Moore then tweeted: "It is my understanding that the situation was not a joke and that through the collective efforts here, action was taken to provide help!"

The strange thing about Twitter is that it seems to play a far more significant and effective role in the toughest of situations. You can see Demi Moore's bottom in many places. You can't always help save a life.

So perhaps it is not entirely surprising that Ms. Moore went to bed early Friday with the tweet: "Good Night Twitterers--this day has been an extraordinary. I am taking pause to reflect on all the blessings I have in my life Thank you!!"

There is much talk of how Twitter is helping stars control their own PR, rather than allow it to be dictated by the exigencies of the entertainment conglomerate mass.

But how sad would it be if, after this incident, those in need of attention (for one reason or another) began to reach out to their favorite stars for salvation on the microblogging service?

Late Friday, a tweet was left by, or on behalf of, sandieguy. It read: "Thinking that it's absolutely amazing that complete strangers love her. Bless you all and thanks, you don't know what it means."

If she had left the message on a complete stranger's Twitter page (if you read her Twitter feed, she had previously sent many messages both to Ms. Moore and Mr. Kutcher), might it be possible that sandieguy would now be dead?

How many potential suicides, kooks, attention seekers, or just plain narcissists will now emerge from their darkness to try and bathe in a little twittering limelight? And how will anyone ever be able to know which ones really need help?

You know that this will not be the last time.

Facebook has now replaced the gossip, the social event, even the news. That is one explanation as to why 30-year-old Paul Zolezzi, a sometime model, used the social-networking site to announce that he would kill himself. (His body was found hanging from monkey bars in Brooklyn's Mount Prospect Park Playground.)

His status update had read: "Born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn...And couldn't have asked for more."

His mother, Stephanie Zolezzi, told the Daily News: "He probably wanted to be remembered in a big way, to do it dramatically."

Mr. Zolezzi was a heroin addict, and his modeling career had a couple of fits and few starts. This wasn't even the first Facebook status update that had foretold his bitter end.

(Credit: Cc Jakob Botter)

In January, when he was staying in Oregon, he had written: "Paul is going to be the first person ever to hang himself on his way out of Portland."

His mother, who had also had to live with Paul's father's suicide (he threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge), summed up the role Facebook has begun to play for some people: "I would say that people get so lonely, so delusional, that all they want to do is be remembered," she said.

Not everyone can hope to meet someone like Jesse Coltrane online.

Coltrane, a 22-year-old from New Jersey, befriended a teenager from the Sacramento area on MySpace. About a month later, the teen revealed in a Webcam chat that he was cutting himself and intended to take his own life.

Perhaps some of you might remember the case of Abraham Biggs, the Florida teen who made a similar statement last November and went through with his suicide, while being egged on by many pleasant little worms, staring at their Webcams as if this was entertainment.

(Credit: CC Simon Whiston)

Coltrane proved sanity does exist somewhere out there. Perhaps because he is involved in a youth mentoring program, he had no doubts about what he should do. He contacted the police in Sacramento and gave them the teen's cell phone number.

The police visited the teen's apartment. He had cut his arms, but done nothing too drastic. The police arranged for him to receive the appropriate care.

There. Finally a social networking feel-good story.